I just exited from the SharePoint 2007 odissey to correctly configure settings to get updates from Analysis Services 2005 cubes. The big problem is the Microsoft Single Sign-On service, that is the single component who really make the data connection…  Read more

The use of DiscretizationMethod=Clusters can cause a process error that is not so clear: Internal error: Unexpected error. File ‘mddiscretizer.cpp’, row 1532, function ‘MDDiscretizer::GetBucketForValue’.   This happens because you have an attribute with few distinct values to do a discretization…  Read more

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…  Read more

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…  Read more

It’s a shame I haven’t blogged for two months, but I’ve been really (I mean – REALLY) busy finishing the upcoming Microsoft Programming LINQ book. Now I’m coming back to my BI world and the first news is that I’ll…  Read more

The last news is the acquisition of DATAllegro by Microsoft. From a server point of view, Microsoft is doing well (even if not fast as I’d like). But is on the client side that I (and many other customers) are…  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,…  Read more

In the last months I talked mostly about PowerPivot, but Analysis Services is still growing and a very good sign of that is the number of downloads of The Many-to-Many Revolution whitepaper, who has been published almost 5 years ago…  Read more

Microsoft released the CTP3 of Microsoft SQL Server Code Name “Denali”, as you can see in the SSAS product group blog post. This is the first public release of Denali and after many months of forced silence (I was under…  Read more

The Analysis Services team just posted a blog entry with a few useful links to jumpstart your experience with Tabular project in Analysis Services “Denali”. In these early days I read several messages asking for clarification about the names and…  Read more