Hierarchies are one of the long awaited features that will now be available in the latest version of PowerPivot. Hierarchies are useful because it allows a single click for a user to bring in all the fields that exist in a natural table hierarchy. Normally the user would have to drag in all fields individually so this can be a time saver especially if it is an 8 level hierarchy. Hierarchies are very simple to create and easy to interact with in the reporting layer as well. To get started you mus...
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A little over a year ago Patrick LeBlanc wrote a blog post about inserting an unknown row into a dimension . This is a great script and i've used it dozens of time, but this week I made a few modifications to it that I thought I would share. First I changed how the Column names are generated with the coaleasce function. Here's that section of the code: Declare @columns varchar(max), @schema sysname, @table sysname Set @schema = 'dbo' Set @table = 'DimCustomer' SELECT @columns = coalesce(@columns...
For those of you in the Tallahassee, FL area on August 9th at 6:00 pm I will be speaking virtually for the Tallahassee PASS user group. Several of the groups leaders attended SQL Saturday in Jacksonville this year and after speaking with them it sounds like they have a fanatics group that they've been building. Be sure to sign up for their group news to get the info on their future meetings http://tallahassee.sqlpass.org/Home.aspx In August I'll be speaking at a very high level of Business Intel...
The new “Denali” PowerPivot has a lot of fanatic new additions that I’ve really been looking forward to. Many of my biggest complaints from the first version of the product have been addressed. One of these complaints was the lack of a visual representation of object relationships. You had to rely on the little window shown below (the Active column is new) to create and manage relationships. In the latest version of PowerPivot you will now have the ability to view these relationships in a diagra...
There are a lot of fantastic new features in the latest CTP 3 release of PowerPivot, which you can download here . This is a huge change for PowerPivot and really shows how the product is maturing into become a tool that can solve a variety of problems that it could not handle in its initial release last year. You can read up on all the change that in the latest release of PowerPivot here , but I thought I would write a series of blogs detailing each individually. In this post I’d like to introd...
Tonight I took my first crack at getting SQL Server Denali up and running on my machine. From what I had read so far there are no longer issue with installing a side by side instance of Denali with an existing SQL Server install so I went that route. The previous CTP caused issues with BIDS because the old CTPs still used Visual Studio 2008. Now in CTP 3 all Business Intelligence development is done is Visual Studio 2010 removing that previous flaw. Some initial thoughts about the installation p...