I am proud to announce that SQLBI community will be at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2007 (May 9-11, 2007 – Seattle). You can meet me and Alberto Ferrari in the User Group Area, booth #532 . We will try to make our booth visible with  Read more

Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting post about the need of more properties to control the behavior of a Merge component in Integration Services (SSIS). This apparent simple problem becomes very important in large data warehouses. I hope that someone  Read more

Alberto Ferrari posted some test we made working on performance optimization loading data in very large dimension tables. When we discovered that an int identity primary key is not handled by SQL Server just as an ordered set of data in a bulk operation…  Read more

If you edit a legacy DTS package with SQL Server Management Studio, you may want to know how we can show the multi-phase data pump operations. I haven’t found an option to do this with SQL Server Management Studio. However, when you need to do something,  Read more

Almost one month ago I made a post about a brand new Distinct component for SSIS made by Alberto Ferrari and freely available on SQLBI.EU . The most used way to get distinct rows in a Data Flow that I’ve seen is to use the Sort component, asking only  Read more

After many tries, today I came to the conclusion that Analysis Services 2005 SP2 breaks the Excel 2007 calculated member selection feature. I already talked about this issue here , but today I found the way to reproduce the error. This is a scenario that  Read more

Alberto Ferrari has published on SQLBI.EU a Distinct component for SSIS . The big advantage is less memory used when you have few distinct values extracted from a large set of data. Component and source code are freeware. Now the challenge is: how to  Read more

Today I had a big trouble with one customer. We migrated an AS2000 solution to SSAS2005, making a lifting to dimensions just to consolidate into attributes what were indipendent dimensions in the old cube. One of the old dimensions contained only one  Read more

This is the paper we waited for a long long time: the Analysis Services 2005 Performance Guide is available for download from MSDN downloads. This paper is 120 pages of really precious informations. I don’t have time to read all now, but I have found  Read more

I wrote a simple C# class that is useful to manage custom MDX scripts (like custom members definitions) on existing cubes, without the need of a new deployment. I named it MdxScriptUpdater and it is freely available here: http://www.sqlbi.eu/mdxscriptupdater.aspx  Read more