Microsoft released a short whitepaper about how scaling-out queries to a SSAS database leveraging on SAN snapshot features . It's an interesting read if you have a SSAS database with many users and don't have the time to copy a database on several servers  Read more

I fixed an issue of the DateTool dimension I presented in a previous post . The DateTool was unusable on OWC 11, which is the component used by BI Dev Studio and SQL Server Management Studio to browse a cube. I only added two statements in MDX Script  Read more

Alberto posted one of the patterns we use designing a dimensional model (this one is about the discretization of a measure into a dimension). We'd like to get some feedback about this solution: is there someone who used similar patterns? We consider this  Read more

Microsoft has released a valuable white paper with a self-explaining title: SQL Server Best Practices Article: Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services . The document has a part of explanation of  Read more

Year-To-Date and Difference-Over-Previos-Year (or Year-Over-Year Growth) are among the most required features of any user. Some OLAP client (like ProClarity) offers features that try to solve this problem client-side, but I don’t like this approach given  Read more

Sometimes there is a simple way to solve an issue. For example, if you want to color all measures (including calculated measures) in red when the value is negative, you can simply write: SCOPE ( Measures. AllMembers ); FORE_COLOR ( THIS ) = IIF ( Measures.  Read more

In the last months, I got the infamous "it's by design" answer for many bugs/issues/irrational behaviors I posted to Microsoft. For most of them I used the Connect web site, in a couple of cases I opened a formal incident to Microsoft support. There are  Read more

BI Developer Studio does a lot of automatic changes when you change something. Each dimension is stored in a separate file, but many of the dimension informations are copied into cube files. When you modify a dimension which is already used by one or  Read more

SQLCAT (Customer Advisory Team) has announced the release of DMVStats . It produces a database (calling it data warehouse is very ambitious) that contains snapshots caught through Dynamic Management Views (DMV) of SQL Server 2005. You can see database  Read more

It seems that Microsoft will not improve the slow SCD component that is part of SSIS (at least, this is what I understand from this Microsoft Connect answer ). This means that TableDifference has a long life because it will be useful even in SQL Server  Read more