I found an interesting "how-to" guide to Excel 2007 Pivot Table. It is a sample chapter from the Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007 book. Probably not all the described feature are available in a Pivot Table attached to an Analysis  Read more

I am proud to announce that SQLBI community will be at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2007 (May 9-11, 2007 – Seattle). You can meet me and Alberto Ferrari in the User Group Area, booth #532 . We will try to make our booth visible with  Read more

I wrote a simple C# class that is useful to manage custom MDX scripts (like custom members definitions) on existing cubes, without the need of a new deployment. I named it MdxScriptUpdater and it is freely available here: http://www.sqlbi.eu/mdxscriptupdater.aspx  Read more

Often end users use Excel to navigate into the cube. Then they may ask you to produce a report using the same data. It would be useful to get the MDX query used by Excel. Moreover, Excel 2007 offers a good MDX quality of the produced query against Analysis  Read more

When you create a linked measure group into a cube, the cube you are creating inherits properties of original measures by copying values into the new cube. If you change the format string into the original cube, you don't modify automatically the linked  Read more

I just submitted a suggestion feedback to SQL Server development team. It is very bad for the user to be forced to see measures under their physical measure groups. There are a lot of reasons for which a customer would like to see measures organized in  Read more

This is the news for 2007: the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference will be in Seattle, May 9-11 (I got the link thanks to Chris Webb's post ). I suppose we will see PerformancePoint Server in action and may be some anticipation of Katmai. I'm curious  Read more

If you use SQL Prompt v3 and/or SQL Refactor like me (they are very useful), you will appreciate this hint on how to correctly enable SQL Server Management Studio add-in menus on a non-admin user account. You have to run this command within each non-admin  Read more

I just read this updated paper on MDX performance hints. The section Calculation Non Empty Behavior is very interesting because it clarified me some doubt I had using the Non Empty Behavior property for a measure. The lesson I learnt is that it is better  Read more

I recently noted a behavior of named sets (specifically, the resolution order) that can be not so intuitive. When you define a named set on the cube, it has the same behavior of a session-scoped named set (the one you create with CREATE SESSION SET statement  Read more