I hope you were able to attend my free webinar on Ad-hoc Reporting with SharePoint on May 21, 2013. If you weren’t you can now watch the recording here . As usual there were many great questions that I wasn’t able to answer and I thought I’d follow up on those now. Q: In the organization that I work in, SharePoint 2013 is stood up but is somewhat barren, just some team pages. Where would I be able to locate the ReportBuilder environment in a 2013 implementation? Is it apparent ...
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I hope you were able to attend my free webinar on Introduction to Analysis Services on April 2, 2013. If you weren’t you can now download the recording here . Because I covered new material all the way to the end of the webinar i thought I'd also answer some of the top questions I didn’t have time to answer here. Q: Is it true that not all versions of Excel 2013 support PoverPivot. From what I read you need Office 2013 "Pro Plus". Here is a great post by Rob Collie that answers this ...
Join me tomorrow, April 2. 2013, at 11:00 PM EST for a free webinar which is part of an entire month of Back to Basics themed free training. This webinar is for anyone trying to understand the basics behind Analysis Services and how to get started design a cube. With the release of SQL Server 2012 there are now two forms of Analysis Services so we’ll also spend time discussing Multidimensional and Tabular and why you would choose one over the other. Also, during this webinar I reference a ...
These days the fastest way, not always the most accurate, to get news is through social media. Technology, sports, politics, and breaking news will always be found first on social media outlets like Twitter. For example, I’m a huge fan of American Football or most known as the NFL. Every year the NFL teams draft players from college teams to play professionally. This is done through a big televised spectacle called the NFL Draft and is held across multiple days once a year generally in Apr...
When SQL Server 2008 R2 was released several new Reporting Services expressions were made available that would help join multiple datasets together. Those functions were the Lookup Function , LookupSet Function and the MultiLookup Function . My general recommendation for these function is not to use them when you have two dataset from the same data source. They’re really intended for connecting datasets together that are not directly related because otherwise I could just handle it in my s...
What is Data Explorer Data Explorer simplifies the data discovery phase for Excel users that are creating self-service Business Intelligence solutions. It does this by provided straightforward methods for connecting to data previously unheard of, without a developer, in Excel. It also provides a basic ETL tool for those involved in self-service BI projects all within Excel. What do I need Currently Data Explorer is only available as a preview and works with Excel 2010 SP1 or Excel 2013. You can ...
What is Inquire The Inquire Add-in for Excel 2013 helps you analyze and review your workbooks for things like relationships, invalid formulas, and to compare .xlsx files for differences. Let’s take some time to review how to enable the add-in and then how to use it. Enabling the Add-in If you are using Office Professional Plus, the Inquire add-in comes installed with Excel you simply need to enable it. The Inquire add-in is already installed with Excel 2013 you simply need to enable it by ...
I’m very excited to announce that you can now purchase my latest release book: Knight’s Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Integration Services 24-Hour Trainer . The 24-Hour series of books offered by Wrox is a great way to get kick started into learning a new tool. Not only are the lessons very focused, making it easier to learn something new, but you also receive a DVD that accompanies the book. The DVD walks you through each of the lessons with the author showing you an example of solving ...
Did you attend PASS Summit and miss out on some sessions because there were so many or you were busy networking? Good news! The recordings are now available for free to watch streaming for all those who attended the conference now here . If you weren’t an attendee you can still watch the sessions for a small price here . Enjoy the great content!
Life is finally returning to normal after a great week in Seattle for PASS Summit 2012. The entire year is basically other smaller events (still great events!) that occur to pass the time until Summit arrives. Like Ted Kummert said in the keynote on Wednesday PASS Summit is like a big family reunion. Here’s a summary of how my week went: Friday I did my duty of Early Voting in Florida (I didn’t know then it would take Florida 5 days to announce it’s winner) before taking for an...
Thanks to all who attended my webinar last Thursday on Building Dynamic Cube Reports. You can find my code Recording: http://pragmaticworks.com/LearningCenter/FreeTrainingWebinars/WebinarDetails.aspx?ResourceId=470 Code: http://sdrv.ms/RqxbcF There are several reports in here that step you through the changes I made throughout the webinar. Also, look for my upcoming SSRS Master Classes that will take you Reporting Services skills to the next level!
Join me next week for a really fun presentation on building Dynamic SSRS reports using Analysis Services cubes as a data source. This webinar will demonstrate how you can use one of the underutilized features of Analysis Services called Dynamic Management Views. Session details: Designing Dynamic SSRS Reports using an Analysis Services Data Source Instructor: Devin Knight Date/Time: 10/25/2012 11:00 AM Creating Reporting Services reports that use Analysis Services as a data source can frustratin...
If you missed any of the great 24 hour of PASS sessions from September you can now watch the recordings. http://www.sqlpass.org/UserLogin.aspx?returnurl=%2fLearningCenter%2fSessionRecordings%2f24HoursFall2012.aspx Details on my session can be found below: Session 01 - Choosing the Right Reporting Platform Presenters: Brian Knight , Devin Knight Download presentation slides (PDF)
Several weeks ago I posted a quick survey on my blog that asked how you choose a session to attend when you have so many options at conferences. Thought I’d share the results of the survey today. I don’t think there’s anything surprising about it. Most people overwhelmingly responded that the number one reason they choose to attend a session is simply because they needed to learn the topic.
Last week during my 24 Hours of PASS session on Choosing a Reporting Platform I fielded a question that appeared multiple times during the Q&A so I thought it would be worth post. When using Power View in Excel 2013 the first thing you may notice is a screen like the below screenshot prompting you to download and install Silverlight. The question that many people in the session had was no matter how many times they installed Silverlight they couldn’t make it past this screen prompting ...
Tomorrow Brian Knight and I will kick off 24 hours of PASS with a session on Choosing a Microsoft Reporting Platform. I hope you’re able to join use and indulge in the all day learnathon that PASS is putting on with great list of amazing speakers. If you’ve never attended 24 hours of PASS I encourage you to check out as many sessions as possible! From the PASS website: 24 Back-to-back Hours of Free SQL Server Training! Get your learning on – indulge in free online SQL Server tr...
Many of you have attended sessions by technical speakers at conferences and mini-conferences like SQL Saturday, SQL Rally, 24 Hours of PASS, PASS Summit and many other non-PASS affiliated conference. You all have different reasons for attending a particular session so I thought it would be interesting to take a poll on what your number one reason for attending a session is. Obviously, you may at times use all of these reasons but i'm curious what your top reason for choosing to attend a session ...
September is another busy month of speaking events for me and I thought I’d share them with you so maybe I can see you at one of the events. Date: 09/08/2012 Group: SQL Saturday #167 Columbus, GA Topic: Adapting Your ETL Solution to use SSIS 2012 With all the great new features added to SSIS in SQL Server 2012 it is important to understand how they can make your development life easier. This session will not only highlight what is new in SSIS but also show how your existing solutions can b...
Last Wednesday at Jacksonville SQL Server User Group (JSSUG) we held our annual Speaker Idol event. Read more about what the events all about here . The event was a success and the speakers all got some great feedback from our panel of experienced speakers ( Eric Wisdahl , Jorge Segarra , and Mike Davis ). First up was Hari Reddy on a presentation on Wait Stats. His presentation was very through and easy to follow. Next was John Kauffman on a demonstration of script he created to audit delete st...
The Jacksonville SQL Server User Group (JSSUG) has always encouraged new talent to be added to the pool of local speakers. That’s why tomorrow we will be hosting an annual event called Speaker Idol (I know the name isn’t very original don’t kill me!), which is for anyone that’s interested in speaking at events like SQL Saturday but need a safe place to get started. The group of speakers we have participating are: John Kauffman Hari Reddy Ryan Cox TJ Brown Anthony Coleman ...
Somehow I missed this gem that’s been around for quite a while so I thought I would share it in case anyone else has yet to see it. The Forward Engineer add-in is a really great open source project that allows Visio database diagrams you create to easily be converted to T-SQL that will create physical objects in a SQL Server database for you. If you’ve ever used Visio for visualizing existing databases into a diagram then you’ve likely used the standard Reverse Engineer option....
OLAP PivotTable Extensions is a really cool free add-in for Excel that’s been around for quite a while now. It allows you to have some exposure to what’s going on under the covers (Among many other features) while you browse a cube using an Excel PivotTable. This weekend there has been an updated version and you should check out the features and download it now! http://olappivottableextend.codeplex.com The new features in this release are: Support for Excel 2013 Upgrading to the AS20...
With the Office 2013 announcements today I was excited to download and get my hands on the tools. Because this is still a customer preview we’re bound to find things here and there that aren’t functioning as expected when experimenting with the Office tools. The things I had on my list to test first were Power View and PowerPivot from Excel (Yes, Power View is now available in Excel). In this post I’ll focus on helping you get started with PowerPivot. With Excel 2013 you no lon...
This has been reposted from a guest blog post I wrote on the Microsoft Business Intelligence team blog . Fulfilling User Needs Developing a Power View report has been touted as being so simple that within a handful of clicks you can add rather impressive elements, like effective visualizations, to a report. This isn’t always the case with other tools in the market. The goal of this post is to walk you through Power View as if you were designing a report for the first time, and show you how...
I’m usually pretty hesitant to share scripts I write because inevitably it will get torn to pieces, but in this case I’d actually like some feedback so I can continue to grow this solution. This script spawned from Jorge Segarra (@SQLChicken) and I working on a project together that had a SQL Agent job that somehow got hung up for 4 days on the SQL Server when it normally takes less than 10 minutes. Now, Jorge is a superb DBA so he had setup notifications upon SQL Agent failures but ...