SQL Saturday Jacksonville is just under a month away (April 28) and I’m happy to announce the we recently released the schedule for the event. We have a great line up of speakers with a variety of topics for both DBAs and Business Intelligence developers. You can register to attend the event here . While the speakers may be all set for the event we’re still looking for sponsors. If you’re interested in sponsoring our event please visit our sponsorship page . Don’t forget ...
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If you’ve followed this blog series from the beginning then you may have started thinking about which tools would be best for your environment. If so that’s great and I’m glad I got you thinking, but I encourage you to keep an open mind as we go through the last couple tools because both PerformancePoint and Power View provide some of the most impressive visualizations that the Microsoft BI reporting tools have to offer. If you’re new to reading this blog series I encoura...
Today I’ll be continuing in a blog series designed to help you decide which presentation tool is best for your reporting needs. So far I’ve discussed in previous posts: Reporting Services Excel (From the perspective of building PivotTables without PowerPivot) You learned how these two tools are almost opposites of each other. Reporting Services is generally thought of as a static reporting tool, while Excel is usually used for ad-hoc reporting. The products still left to cover are: P...
Another release that went without much trumpeting was the SQL Server 2012 Data Mining add-in for Excel 2010. This has been a much awaited release for those vested in Data Mining. The current release was only available for Excel 2007 and if you tried to use it in Excel 2010 it only worked for 32 bit machines. You’ll find now a 32 bit and 64 bit version available now. Go download and start playing with the latest release here. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=29061
Somewhat overshadowed, for obvious reasons, by the big RTM release of SQL Server 2012 was the RTM release of PowerPivot 2012. You can go download the much improved version of PowerPivot for Excel here. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=29074 To give you a fair warning there are some prerequisites to installing that were not required in the previous version of PowerPivot that you can find on the download site: Install .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office R...
This post is a continuation of a series started to help you understand each of the Microsoft presentation layer tools purpose and when you should choose each for your reporting solution. The decision to pick the appropriate tool is difficult but so very important as I detailed in part one of this series. As I continue the discussion here again are the different tools I will detail: Reporting Services Excel (From the perspective of building PivotTables without PowerPivot) PowerPivot PerformancePo...
As Business Intelligence has evolved over the years the number of tools we have to choose from for presenting data has advanced drastically. With so many tools to choose from it can be rather confusing (especially when your company is just getting their feet wet in BI) to determine which tool is the right one for an organizations reporting needs. Just within the Microsoft suite of tools (not including third-party tools) you have Reporting Services, Excel, PowerPivot, PerformancePoint and Power V...