Bart De Smet just wrote a long post about LINQ predicates that can be defined without returning a boolean value. This is something I partially evaluated writing the Programming Microsoft LINQ book, but in his post Bart goes very deep on this topic and  Read more

This post is part of a Methodology discussion – other posts will follows. I will be happy to get your feedback! Building a BI solution (like any kind of software project), it is normal to look for existing methodologies and best practices, just to avoid  Read more

Paul Stovell made a presentation on ” Reactive Programming and Bindable LINQ ” at TechED Australia 2008 (unfortunately, I was at the antipode in Italy, but the topic is really interesting). I didn’t know there are projects somewhat similar to Bindable  Read more

This post is part of a Methodology discussion – other posts will follows. I will be happy to get your feedback! One interesting question is “How do you measure the complexity of a BI solution?” If we need to decide whether a specific technique is suitable  Read more

In the last years I spent most of my time working on BI solutions based on the SQL Server platform. I had experiences with other architectures but I mostly used Kimball’s methodology to design relational databases feeding SSAS cubes. However, Kimball  Read more

Ok, this could be partially off topic, but if you work on BI it is not. I will be a speaker at the Microsoft Sharepoint Conference 2008 in Milan (Italy) on 2 and 3 October 2008. I have one speech about building digital dashboards using SharePoint, Reporting  Read more

I just received a mail from Adam Machanic that pointed me to this bug (I would call it a performance issue) about the construction of SQL statements generated by the LINQ to SQL engine. The issue: every string passed as a constant in the query will be  Read more

Today I solved an issue for a customer that was a little bit unexpected, at least for me. The scenario: a table with a few records is periodically updated: a few records are inserted (with a bulk insert) and a few records are deleted (the older ones).  Read more

I just installed the Allocation Information add-in for SQL Server Management Studio . It’s very cool having this tool integrated into SSMS. It is a free add-in published on CodePlex. Take a look, it does worth the download in my opinion.  Read more

In the Programming Microsoft LINQ book we dedicated two whole chapters (76 pages) about the writing of a IQueryable LINQ provider: one is about expression trees and the other covers the several ways to extend LINQ, including the writing of an IQueryable  Read more