I just answered to a newsgroup question about the use of views as fact tables to populate cubes. I am a strong supporter of the need to build a star schema before to build a UDM, while I understand that in some circumstances (few data, fast prototypes)  Read more

After a month of editing, I finally released my paper titled “The many-to-many revolution”. I copied in this post the introduction of the 84-page paper that is published (for free!) on a dedicated dimensional modeling page of SQLBI.EU web site. I would  Read more

I started to evaluate the use of linked dimension across different database on the same server. I encountered the first issue after a few minutes: when you link a dimension, VS editor create a dimension file that copies the structure of the dimension,  Read more

Alberto Ferrari wrote a nice post with a workaround to generate tables in different SQL Server 2005 schemas starting from a single Visio document. The trick includes a SQL script to do the magic. I hope that next Visio version would be able to do that  Read more

I’m approaching the review phase for a paper I wrote about advanced dimensional modeling with Analysis Services 2005 using many-to-many dimension relationships. Currently the paper has around 80 page (with many figures!) and covers 2 base techniques (base  Read more

I just opened the wiki on SQLBI.EU : it contains link to useful resources for BI solution development with SQL Server, so it covers SSIS, SSAS, SSRS and of course SQL Server itself. The wiki works well when there is large contribution, so please share  Read more

I just answered to a request on SQLBI.EU forum of someone that is looking for a better lookup component, specifically designed for typical Data Warehouse scenarios. While you can read the whole thread on the forum , I try to resume most wanted requirements,  Read more

Two weeks ago I wrote a tool to ease and improve the migration of a DTS package to a SSIS package. I named the tool DtsToSsis-Prepare, it is available with full source code at www.sqlbi.eu and now I wrote a larger article that describes the needs that  Read more

Thanks to Alberto Ferrari there is a new way to handle Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD) with Integration Services: he just released Table Difference 1.1 and FlowSync 1.0 . Both are downloadable at www.sqlbi.eu . The problem that those components solve  Read more

I wrote a small tool to improve the migration from SSIS to DTS. The problem I had to solve was this: I have many Data Transform Tasks that have a simple behavior, read data from a query and write data on a table, using fast load with batch insert. You  Read more