Today I discovered that you can have a working AS2000 database without repository data relative to structure internals to that database (cubes and dimensions). Just to explain how it works. You have a "Foodmart 2000" database Into the Olap Data directory,  Read more

Recently I discovered that a very large dimension could be loaded more effectively by SSAS2005 if it is designed as a snowflake schema instead than as a singular table (star schema). I have to say that I'm a strong supporter of star schema, but these  Read more

A short post to link this article: Configuring HTTP Access to SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 . Very useful: I haven't found a clear description for this task in Books On Line (but, we know, beta documentation is not  Read more

This useful post of Karen Watterson has a link to the first chapter of the upcoming book Data Mining with SQL Server 2005 by ZhaoHui Tang and Jamie MacLennan. In the same post there are other useful links to articles and video about Data Mining on SQL  Read more

I've just attended the Excel 12 BI session held by Amir Netz and Allan Folting. This is the first time that Excel 12 BI functionality are shown to the public. My expectations seems to be satisfied, even if I really want to put my hands on a Beta, but  Read more

I've seen Excel 12 and SharePoint v3 integrated with SQL Server 2005 Report Builder and Analysis Services here at PDC: we've seen very little, but enough to understand that this combination is what can really leverage on SQL 2005 BI capabilities. Tomorrow  Read more

I'm sitting in DAT411 session room and I've just heared that Microsoft is considering to release SSIS Migration Wizard as shared source: please do it and do it now! :-) I've a lot of DTS packages that could be really better migrated if only I could modify  Read more

Today, while digging into time intelligence wizard-generated scripting, I discovered that Analysis Services 2005 has a new syntax for range operations that give us more flexiblity. You can define a range of members like "all members from X to the end"  Read more

Today I deeply tested processing options of Analysis Services 2005. A complete discussion of it is available on this paper by T. K. Anand , so I will not describe what is already well written but I'd like to share my today experience. What is more interesting  Read more

I'm waiting for the next CTP (September 05?) because it should work with cascading many-to-many dimensions. In a previous post I talked about the lack of functionality when you have more many-to-many dimensions chained together (I named this scenario  Read more