April 2006 Entries



Monad/MSH/Powershell What's in a name

I think I'm with Mitch on this one. I'm not overly keen on “PowerShell“, the new name for Monad. The product team have already renamed their blog to PowerShell, so it could be pretty much a done deal, but there seems to be a fair bit of criticism on Scobles post about the new name. While there are some people who point out some worse possible names, there are not many people showering the new name in praises. I quite liked Monad and even MSH was acceptable (although I don't know if Microsoft ......

Blogcasts

Along the same lines as the MSDN Nuggets that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, I just came across

www.blogcasts.com

Looks like they have some interesting stuff, now I just need to find a few more hours in the day to look at any of this stuff :)

SSIS collapses in a screaming heap

I am having lots of fun tonight :) It's one of those nights when everything I touch breaks. I started a brand new SSIS project and tried to add a new connection and got the following error: The connection manager 'OLEDB' is not properly installed on this computer Now, I am not using my laptop much during the day for SSIS development, but I know it was working a couple of weeks ago and I was pretty sure that I had not done anthing to much up my machine. I tried added any sort of task to the control ......

Extracting Olap Data from SSAS using SSIS

There was a question on the newsgroup a few months ago asking how to extract data from an Analysis Services cube and store it in a SQL table using SSIS. I responded saying that in theory you should be able to setup a connection using the OLE DB provider for MSOLAP 9.0 and then put an MDX query in place of the SQL text. And I even when as far as setting up a package and previewing the data to make sure this was a viable approach. To this point everything looked fine and I assumed that the next step ......

Documentation Tools

I got these interesting links sent to me by Marco. http://www.dtsdoc.com http://www.dbdesc.com And while they are interesting and the sample output looks quite good, I can't help wondering when we will see tools like these appear for SQL 2005. Especially with the way xml is so intrinsic to SSAS and SSIS. I have started doing some of my own investigation into documenting SSAS and it looks quite promising ......

When is an Empty cell Non Empty and a Non Empty Cell Empty?

I came across an interesting isssue on the microsoft.public.sqlserver.... newsgroup the other day. A calculated member, that calculates with an amount was being excluded from the results when the NON EMPTY clause was added to the axis. At first I thought this could have been related to the solve order issue that Chris Webb discussed at http://spaces.msn.com/cwebb... but the only calculated member involved here was the one created in the query scope, so that could ......

SSIS Whitepapers from Microsoft

I was reading Jamie Thomson's “Life the Universe and SSIS” blog the other day and came across these two interested posts Interesting reads SSIS: Whitepaper on Performance Tuning Techniques Which highlight a number of interesting SSIS related whitepapers that Microsoft has released recently. We are only just starting to get into our first two projects using SSIS at work and even though they are going well I can tell we are still on the early part of the learning curve. The product has ......

Meet Monad - your new best friend

I have been playing with Monad (also known as MSH) for a couple of weeks now... and I like it! It is the new scripting engine from Microsoft that is being developed as part of WinFx. I started hearing whispers about Monad a few weeks ago, just before Scott Hanselman did his podcast on the subject. This stuff looks really cool, you can seamlessly get access WMI, COM and .Net components. There appear to be Monad resources popping up all over the web. The guys at Readify have started a script library ......

Processing an AS2005 cube from the command line with XMLA

There was a question recently on the Analysis Services newsgroup asking how to process an Analysis Services 2005 cube using XMLA from the command line. Below is a script based on Chris Harrington's excellent Thin Olap blog. This is the absolute minimum script required to get an Analysis Services database to process (ie. No error handling <g>). On my machine I processed my “Sandpit“ database (the sandpit is where I play) with the following command cscript xmlaProcess.vbs Sandpit ......

OT: A new name for WinFx ?

If you have not heard by now, Microsoft is having copyright/trademark issues with one of their new technologies - Windows Workflow Foundation. I have heard mixed stories but apparently one or both of the World Wildlife Foundation and the World Wrestling Federation have complained about Microsoft's use of the WWF acronym. I thought I would offer up my solution to this pickle which Microsoft currently find themselves in. I think rather than call these technologies Windows Foundations they could use ......

MCMS News

As you can see from my tag line, I have the rather strange combination of having BI skills and Content Management Server skills. And as it happens I have taken a brief break from my current AS 2005 project to swing over onto fixing up a CMS project that has gone a bit astray. So on the while I am in CMS mode there are a couple of interesting CMS developments recently. Andrew Connell (MCMS MVP) has posted a link to an upcoming webcast about the evolution of web content management in the 2007 version ......

Microsoft buys Proclarity

Mosha has done it, as has Chris and Marco, so even though I should join in too. There is an official press release here http://www.microsoft.com/pr... Proclarity has always been highly regarded and I think it will round out Microsoft's BI stable very nicely. It was interesting to read Chris's post and some of the comments on people have posted under Mosha's entry. Ok, so I'm a little slow this time, but I don't want to be the only one not to blog about ......

MSDN Nuggets

I have watched a few full length web casts from Microsoft and a couple of episodes of dnrTV. And while these are a great learning tool, it is not always easy to find an hour to set aside to watch many of these (well it's not easy for me <g> ) I came across the following after someone posted a reference to them on the aus-dotnet mailling list. MSDN Nuggets: http://www.microsoft.com/uk... The concept looks really interesting, these are little 10-15 minute videos on specific ......

Upgraded Foodmart 2000 sample database for Analysis Services 2005

Soon after installing Analysis Services 2005 I upgraded the Foodmart 2000 sample database from Analysis Services 2000. Foodmart is kind of the equivalent of the pubs database in the SQL Server world. Sample queries and questions on newsgroups are often posted using Foodmart. Someone else in the newsgroups asked if anyone had an upgraded copy of this database as they had Mosha's “Fast track to MDX” book and all the samples are against Foodmart 2000. I did a backup of it both with and without data ......

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I am a consultant, based in Melbourne Australia. I primarily work in the Business Intelligence area with SQL Server, although I also dabble in Content Management Server and .Net coding

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