The news is that Microsoft announced it has agreed to acquire ProClarity . Now a decent client for Analysis Services 2005 will be available from Microsoft, and I hope that a new commercial licensing scheme will allow to small companies to get a mixed  Read more

I recently had some problem with memory configuration of SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 and I’d like to share lessons I got. This post is a replacement for my previous post , that I striked to keep history of some bad assumptions I initially made.  Read more

I recently discovered a few pitfalls on memory configuration of SQL Server Analysis Services 2005: the main problem is that the default configuration (written by setup) doesn’t consider the actual physical resources (mainly RAM) of your server and this  Read more

Thanks to Romeo Pruno , I just discovered a sample of Excel 2003 customization to access OLAP data through task panes. While this article deserves to be read, I think that client customization is a sort of “last resort”, to be applied only for particular  Read more

Thanks to a blog reader, I just discovered that if you create a Report Builder Model from a UDM and try to create a report filtering a date field, the date you specify in the filter dialog box is inverted (months with days) when the MDX query is generated.  Read more

I just discovered that some weeks ago Microsoft released a cumulative upgrades of hotfixes for Analysis Services 2000 released after SP4. I have to say that I noted AS 2000 is less stable after SP4 intallation (I can say that after months of use) and  Read more

Tonight I’ve studied how to improve performance of SCD transformation task of SSIS. I started from the consideration that in an actual SSIS package, the dimension processing is at least one magnitude slower than fact table processing; most of the time  Read more

I just downloaded and tried the CalendarTransform component for SSIS that Microsoft realesed with a shared source permissive license . It’s a useful data flow transformation component that is able to generate apparently all of the attributes you can desire  Read more

A few days ago I have encountered a system error deploying a SSAS project that involves role member. The error message is too generic and it hides the real cause of the problem that is very hard to find. The problem itself is really simple: if you try  Read more

Microsoft released a new release of Excel AddIn for SQL Server Analysis Services : it’s the version 1.5 which is compatible with Analysis Services 2005, compatible in the sense that it fully navigates attributes and hierarchies in a meaningful way. Unfortunately,  Read more