August 2007 Entries



SSAS: Query Performance Tuning Whitepaper

I suppose by now most of you have seen all the other posts about the Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services whitepaper that was just released. I saw them all too and I was not planning to do another yet another "read this cool whitepaper" post. But, even thoufh I have only just started reading through it, I do have a couple of points I want to make. 1) The first is a shameless plug: BIDSHelper www.codeplex.com/bidshelper gets a mention on ......

SSAS 2008: MDX changes in Katmai

Wow things have been moving fast this morning. First Mosha posts about some new features in SSAS 2008, that have been available for 3 months, but no one (to the best of my knowledge) has known about. No sooner do I complain to Mosha that none of this stuff was listed in any of the "What's New" pages in the CTP, that he comes out with this post pointing to the documentation for new features that are in the current CTP. (The old versions of the "What's New" pages do not seem to be available anymore, ......

SSAS: AMO Powershell Provider

Following up from my recent post on Powershell, I have updated the Powershell provider for Analysis Services that I wrote back when Powershell was still known by its code name of "Monad", so that it works with the released version of Powershell. I have a few more features that I would like to add to it, but it is quite functional in its current state and I am thinking of putting it up on codeplex in its current form. My main issue now is what to call the thing. The project is currently called AmoPsProvider ......

SSAS: Manipulating Cube Partitions with PowerShell

Jesse Orosz posted some interesting sample code recently on how to remove partitions with a certain prefix using AMO. I thought it would be an interesting comparison to see what similar code would look like in PowerShell. There is definitely not anything wrong with Jesse's code, it's obviously part of a much larger framework. It's more that I think PowerShell is a really good tool for doing these sort of admin tasks and it's an interesting exercise to take someone else's code from .net and re-implement ......

Explaining: BottomCount, Filter and Null in SSAS2005 and ProClarity

Thomas was recently explaining some issues he had with the BottomCount() function in MDX. It was difficult to answer this in a comment on the post, so I thought I would see if I could address some of his issues here. One common business analytical problem is to find customers with low sales. In MDX we have the BottomCount function for that but compared to the TopCount function, that return the best customers, BottomCount can return less clear results. If you run this MDX Select in management studio, ......

SSAS 2008: Data Management Views

[Via Vidas Matelis] Vidas recently did a post about a couple of new features that will be available in SSAS 2008 (but that are not in the July CTP). One of which was DMVs (Data Management Views. These allow you to do things like the following: SELECT * FROM $system.discover_connections SELECT * FROM $system.discover_sessions SELECT connection_id , connection_user_name , connection_host_application , connection_start_timeFROM $system.discover_connections It appears that these DMV's might be providing ......

1 of 71

[via Rob Farley] I just found out that from this post, as of 27 June 2007, Rob and I were 2 of only 71 MCITP:BI certified people in the world. It's a bit of a tough exam as it covers a lot of technologies, SSRS, SSIS and SSAS (OLAP and Data Mining) which could almost be 4 exams in themselves.This means that I know more that 7% of the current MCITP:BI certified people in the world. Now I know I'm not that special - I don't think anyone really knows all these 4 areas equally, If you think you really ......

OT: I'm an Answer!

I went past the MVP Booth at Tech Ed Australia yesterday and found out that I am an answer!

What is the question you may well ask, well I'm glad you did. (no rude suggestions in the comments - funny ones are OK though ). It turns out that there is a questionnaire that the attendees can fill out to win a prize and I am one of the possible answers to one of the questions. Cool.

Tech.Ed Australia is on this week

It's hard having to go up to the Gold Coast in Queensland for work, but some of us are willing to make the sacrifice. :) If any of you out there are going too and would like to say hello, I will be helping out at some of the BI Hands on Labs and will probably swing past the MVP booth occasionally, but the SQL Server area at the Meet the Experts Dinner will probably be the easiest place to track me down ......

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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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