This is not the first time I found non-intuitive issues with collation, Unicode and 8-bit strings with SQL Server, but this time I discovered (more precisely: one of my customers discovered and asked me...) a strange behavior that affects the query plan  Read more

I just added two suggestion items to my feedback for SSAS2005. The first suggestion is about the perspectives: it would be useful to select member filters and default members on each single perspective. Another important thing could be to be able to rename  Read more

I am trying the beta of SQL Refactor (available here ). It is really helpful to refactor the layout of a query and I like to do this in at least three scenarios: when I read a query written by other people, when I need to modify a query in a Reporting  Read more

I just faced the problem to connect an Analysis Services (2000 or 2005) to a SQL Server 2005 database using a OPENROWSET statement. If you face an "access denied" error (precisely, "The OLE DB provider "MSOLAP" for linked server "SERVERNAME" reported  Read more

I just answered to a newsgroup question about the use of views as fact tables to populate cubes. I am a strong supporter of the need to build a star schema before to build a UDM, while I understand that in some circumstances (few data, fast prototypes)  Read more

After a month of editing, I finally released my paper titled "The many-to-many revolution". I copied in this post the introduction of the 84-page paper that is published (for free!) on a dedicated dimensional modeling page of SQLBI.EU web site. I would  Read more

I started to evaluate the use of linked dimension across different database on the same server. I encountered the first issue after a few minutes: when you link a dimension, VS editor create a dimension file that copies the structure of the dimension,  Read more

I love VISIO to make database modeling, it gives very nice and colorful diagrams that I use for the documentation. I hate VISIO as it is really far from perfect, among all the others one thing it lacks is the ability to generate a database using SCHEMA  Read more

Alberto Ferrari wrote a nice post with a workaround to generate tables in different SQL Server 2005 schemas starting from a single Visio document. The trick includes a SQL script to do the magic. I hope that next Visio version would be able to do that  Read more

I'm approaching the review phase for a paper I wrote about advanced dimensional modeling with Analysis Services 2005 using many-to-many dimension relationships. Currently the paper has around 80 page (with many figures!) and covers 2 base techniques (base  Read more