Search results matching tag 'SSAS'

PushBI Desktop and Windows Mobile - Personalized Business Intelligence

Patrick Husting — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:02:00 GMT

I haven't been doing much blogging lately; we are busy working on our business intelligence projects and are fortunate to have a full pipeline of BI projects (SQL, SSAS, SSRS, SPS, PPS and Silverlight). But, I truly believe if you are going to survive as a company, you either innovate or die.

With that said, we have been developing a new business intelligence tool called PushBI, our tool Personalizes Business Intelligence and fills a large gap in desktop monitoring tools along with a mobile business intelligence solution on the Microsoft platform. We had our first successful beta implementation at Microsoft and will roll it out to many other Microsoft groups over the next several months. We are in the process of a soft-launch and informational awareness effort in the United States. Check out our web site at www.PUSHBI.com for more information and download the trial of PushBI and let me know what you think. We are looking for implementation partners in the U.S. and Europe. If you are interested, or know someone who might be, visit our web site and contact us about the opportunities.

Below is a screen shot of the Windows Mobile version of the solution. PushBI also works on BlackBerry, iPhone and Android mobile devices too.

More posts to come on PushBI over the next couple weeks...

One Hop, Two Hop, Three Hop and you are screwed...

Patrick Husting — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:42:00 GMT

So when you are building your PerformancePoint Server solutions, if you have everything on one machine it works great, but when you setup seperate machines, security always becomes kind of a pain. You need to setup Kerberos to setup trust between the web and database servers if you want the users credentials to pass over to the data sources.

If you do not need that and can live with a hard coded credential, you can use a custom data connection string to impersonate a user. Only one user. I used the following web site to create my string.

http://www.ssas-info.com/ssas_articles/ssas_articles/analysis_services_2000_and_2005_connection_string_properties.html

or here is a string to use

Provider=msolap.3;Datasource=olapservername;Initial Catalog=olapdatabasename;User ID=domain\alias;Password=password;Impersonation Level=Impersonate;

SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer (February 2007 CTP)--Now Available

Patrick Husting — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:15:00 GMT

I found this over at the SQL Server Manageability Team Blog. It will help analyze your OLAP databases and give you recommendations for performance. It is worth a look...

"The SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) gathers data from Microsoft Windows and SQL Server configuration settings. BPA uses a predefined list of SQL Server 2005 recommendations and best practices to determine if there are potential issues in the database environment."

"This download is the February 2007 Community Technology Preview of SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer."

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DA0531E4-E94C-4991-82FA-F0E3FBD05E63&displaylang=en

Regards

Patrick

Microsoft Unleashes Service Pack 2 For SQL Server 2005

Patrick Husting — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:47:00 GMT

Microsoft has released a significant update for its widely used SQL Server database software.

The company on Monday announced the general availability of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 -- which contains a number of key enhancements to the software, including full Windows Vista and Office 2007 compatibility.

At the same time, Microsoft has also eased its licensing policy for SQL Server 2005. Owners of the Enterprise Edition are now allowed to run unlimited, virtual instances of the software on a single server. The policy is similar to Microsoft's virtualization rules for running its software on competing platforms, such as the Apple Macintosh. Microsoft requires Vista users wanting to run the OS in virtual mode on Macs to own a premium edition of Vista.

Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2005 also includes add-ins that allow Office 2007 users to perform data mining in SQL Server directly within its Excel 2007 or Visio 2007 applications. And new SQL Server Reporting services are now directly compatible with Microsoft's Sharepoint content management and collaboration software, allowing direct access to SQL Server reports from within Sharepoint.

The service pack also adds support for Oracle databases in the SQL Server Report Builder feature and support for Hyperion's Essbase business intelligence software. Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2005 is available as a free a free download from Microsoft's Web site.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/servicepacks/sp2.mspx

Analysis Services

The 2007 version of Microsoft Office requires the installation of SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services SP2 to support all its business intelligence features. If you run against an instance of Analysis Services that does not have SP2 installed, features of Microsoft Office that require SP2 will be disabled.
The functionality of local and session cubes has been greatly improved.
Performance and scalability has been improved with regard to subselects, running sum calculations, NUMA optimizations for partition processing, partition query scalability, ragged hierarchies, visual totals, ROLAP dimensions, cell writeback, many-to-many dimensions, drillthrough, semi-additive measures, unary operators, and stored procedures.
A warning message now appears when a user-defined hierarchy is not defined as a natural hierarchy.
The MDX Drilldown* functions have a new argument that lets you specify drill down on specified tuples only.
The SCOPE_ISOLATION property has been added to the MDX CREATE method.

This property enables session-scoped and query-defined calculations to be resolved before calculations in the cube, rather than after.
Numerous functionality and performance-related improvements have been incorporated. Specifically, improvements have been made to incremental processing, usage-based aggregation design algorithms, backward and forward compatibility, parent-child security, partition query scalability, cell writeback, and the Time Intelligence Wizard.
The performance and functionality of the neural network viewer has been improved, and support for multiple nested tables has been added.
The performance of naïve bayes predictions have been improved through caching of commonly used attributes.
Neural network training has been improved through better utilization of memory, with sparse training data sets and better utilization of multiple threads during error computation (SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition feature).
Limited support for data mining viewers with local mining models has been added.

The redistribution of data mining viewer controls is now dependent upon ADOMD.NET.
The new redist file will be available in a feature pack that will ship soon after Service Pack 2.

Reporting Services

You can integrate a report server instance with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office 2007 SharePoint Server to store, secure, access, and manage report server items from a SharePoint site. Integration features are provided jointly through SP2 and a special Reporting Services Add-in that you download and install on an instance of the SharePoint technology you are using.

The new Report Viewer Web Part is included in the Reporting Services Add-in that you install on a SharePoint technology instance. For more information about the Web Part and other integration features, see Reporting Services and SharePoint Technology Integration and Features Supported by Reporting Services in SharePoint Integration Mode.
In SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (SSRS), a Select All check box was automatically added when you created an available values list for a multivalue report parameter. If you upgraded to SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1), the Select All check box was no longer available. In SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 (SP2), the Select All check box has been restored. This feature is supported in SQL Server 2005 Express Edition SP2.

For more information, see Breaking Changes in SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.
To access a Hyperion System 9.3 BI+ Enterprise Analytics data source, Reporting Services now provides the Microsoft .NET Data Provider for Hyperion Essbase. This new data processing extension provides a graphical query de

SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services Performance Tuning Whitepaper

Patrick Husting — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 22:21:00 GMT

Just saw this on the Microsoft MSDN web site. Worth the download and read if you are doing OLAP work.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/5/e/85eea4fa-b3bb-4426-97d0-7f7151b2011c/SSAS2005PerfGuide.doc

Regards

Patrick

Hiding Rows with No Data in BSM

Patrick Husting — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:54:00 GMT

I noticed on the discussion groups the other day a question about hiding Row Members in BSM when there is no data in the row. Yes you can do this, but you need to use an MDX Expression to do it. There no checkbox to Hide rows within BSM, which would be a good feature for the next version of the Scorecarding product.

Use the "Filter(your mdx here)" function to do it.

Patrick

Upgraded my BLOGGING software

Patrick Husting — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 21:51:00 GMT

Well, it was easier than I thought and now I have a HUGE task list of things I need to do to the site. I will be updating the look and feel of the content over the next couple months. Please be patient while I make these changes. Enjoy the new features

Patrick