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

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

I’m attending a session about SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 where I’ve seen one of the mostly wanted missing features of previous versions of Reporting Services: it is the Rich TextBox component, that can embed placeholders to compose text with data  Read more

With a strange move, today Microsoft released Katmai SQL Server 2008 CTP June without making a single word about this during the keynote of Bob Muglia. Why they waited the TechEd to make this announcement without highlighting the CTP availablility during  Read more