Marco Russo's Blog
View full profileFree Introducing LINQ book
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
Real Report Builder 2008 improvements for Analysis Services
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
Generate date dimension that support working days calculation
I just wrote a T-SQL query based on CTE that generates support information to calculate working days in a period. Simply look at the WorkingDaySequential measure, which difference between two dates is the number of elapsed working days. In the real world: Read more
SQL Server Virtualization
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
DefaultMember, subcubes and non-aggregatable attributes
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
MDX Studio
My backlog makes me late on a lot of announcements, but I’d like to post a link to the new MDX Studio by Mosha Pasumansky , because this is a very useful tool when you need to dig into an MDX query issue. There is a forum dedicated to the tool on SSAS Read more
MDX query with clear cache in a single statement
Darren Gosbell describes a useful technique to clear cache and execute an MDX statement using a single MDX command window. It’s very very useful when you’re doing performance tuning of your MDX script! Read more
SSAS scale-out with SAN snapshot
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
DateTool dimension improvement
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
Patterns of dimensional modeling design
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