Today I ran into a nice problem with SQL Server fancy way of sorting GUIDS. I know, there should be no reason at all to sort GUID columns but, if what you need is run two tables side by side to check whether they are aligned or not (this is the task of  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

TableDifference has been updated to version 1.2. For those who want to read the main description of the component can be found here but take a look at the full story, this component and the documentaton has been updated several times. You will find complete  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

I just found that this query has different behavior (with breaking differences in result) with different builds of Analysis Services 2005. This is the query (I used a bitmap because this query throws an error when I try to put it in text in Community  Read more

Usually I don't post something just to raise a question - but every rule has its exceptions. As you know, using surrogate keys is a best practice for a lot of reasons. Everything works fine with SSAS when you use surrogate keys with a plain star schema.  Read more

A few months ago I wrote about a SSIS setting you have to use just to get better performance when you (fast) load data into a table with a clustered key. I and Alberto met Stefano Stefani at SQL Server Conference 2007 (an Italian conference where we were  Read more