A new version of BI Portal Sample is available from Microsoft. It looks good, but I still haven't tested it. Integrated with SharePoint and Reporting Services. Support of different localizations. It's not the definitive solution, but may be useful.  Read more

Yesterday I lost at least an hour (but only for a coincidence I haven't lose more hours) because I came across a bug of Analysis Services 2000. If you put a single quote or a double quote inside a comment, the whole MDX expression is not considered. I  Read more

The MovieClick demo is available on SQL Server Data Mining site. I think it's very important to give us this kind of data to make serious test with data mining algorithms of SQL Server 2005. Thanks to the Data Mining Team!  Read more

Not a real BI topic, but today I discovered that you CAN NOT install SQL 2000 or MSDE on Windows XP via Remote Desktop. If you do that, setup hangs at a certain point, when it starts to execute some installation script on SQL Server. The MSDE setup display  Read more

After several years of using Analysis Services and SQL Server 2000, today I stumbled in this problem. I have a DISTINCT COUNT measure that have to measure how many different documents are present in a certain aggregation. Sometimes valid cells has no  Read more

I just atteended a session where Ron Talmage showed the new Snapshot Isolation feature of SQL Server 2005. While it can be used to improve scalability of a traditional LOB application, it's really important to BI applications. Making a long story short,  Read more

Tom Rizzo yesterday at SQL Server Connections announced that Reporting Services SP2 is coming soom and it will bring us a SharePoint WebPart to display reports. Great news.  Read more

Thanks to the SQL Server Data Mining development team, it's live the www.sqlserverdatamining.com web site. You can browse DM models, read tutorials and download samples. Let's go and visit the site, there's no reason to describe it here. One suggestion  Read more

While I'm testing Analysis Services 2005, I'm starting to think about when and how to use the proactive cache feature vs. using the DTS to insert data straight into a MOLAP partition (using the Dimension and Partition Processing Data Flow items). In both  Read more

You know, I'd like to talk about technical issues more than anything else. But who works with BI and MS technologies know that MS offers you a good server (AS2000, that will be great with AS2005) but a poor client experience: if you put toghether Excel  Read more