It's a shame I haven't blogged for two months, but I've been really (I mean - REALLY) busy finishing the upcoming Microsoft Programming LINQ book . Now I'm coming back to my BI world and the first news is that I'll speak about SSAS models based on many-to-many  Read more

More than one year ago I published a paper about design patterns for many-to-many dimension relationships . Since then, I built other models and I got more experience about possible performance optimizations. Unfortunately, I still hadn't time to write  Read more

Usually I write in this blog about Business Intelligence without too much consideration for "traditional" access to SQL Server. However, in a parallel universe I also wrote a book about LINQ and now that we are in full Christmas mode, I hope you may be  Read more

Brian Welcker (who is leaving SSRS team - good luck Brian!) has announced a long explanation of the Report Builder 2008 positioning . For me (and all of you who live in the multidimensional business...) the most important part of the post is this simple  Read more

The new version 2.0 of SSIS SCD handling component TableDifference is in beta, I am searching for beta testers and some help in writing an installer for it. You will find all the informations at www.sqlbi.eu . The final release of the component will be  Read more

I just read the SQL Server Performance in a VMware Infrastructure 3 Environment performance study published by VMware (thanks to virtualization.info for the link ). Often I've been asked if it is a good move having a SQL Server in production in a virtual  Read more

Today I was optimizing a package that handles a very common topic: process some rows and send all them to a flow but, for some of them, make additional processing. A simple Multicast and a Conditional Split solve the problem, the picture explains it better  Read more

Visio database models have column descriptions, SQL Server has extended properties where to store them but, even if they share the same producer, it seems that Visio is unable to store column descriptions in extended properties so that other tools can  Read more

If you have two columns in a table that "remember" their old values in two different historical tables, as it is the case in AdventureWorks with EmployeePayHistory and EmployeeDepartmentHistory, you may need (or just wonder how) to merge these two tables  Read more

Today I discovered that DefaultMember might result in a member other thant the default dimension member. Reading documentation , I got the idea that DefaultMember would be always the default member defined for a dimension into a cube. In reality, the  Read more