This is a tool I would have mentioned in the Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services book I wrote last year. Unfortunately, the ResMon sample cube has been published just a few days before PASS Summit 2010 on CodePlex.  Read more

Yesterday Chris blogged about Varigence Vivid and Bonavista Dimensions . His post remembered me that I might share my comments about Vivid and I had to take a tour around Bonavista Dimensions, and here we are. Varigence Vivid is simply something that  Read more

There is less than one week (and only a few seats) available to register to the first PowerPivot Workshop that will be held in the Netherlands on December 1-2, 2010. I and Alberto spent the last days to refine the last slides and demo. Despite the workshop  Read more

Microsoft recently announced a new roadmap for its BI architecture. The next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Denali”, is going to introduce a new semantic model named BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model). Analysis Services will host it and it  Read more

I’m not a DBA, but I’ve been impressed about how much intuitive and easy to use is the online demo of SQL Monitor from Red Gate . This is what I would really call a useful Dashboard. It could be a good demo for a CFO too!  Read more

Yesterday Microsoft released the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket (which everyone will simply call DataMarket, I hope). It was previously called Codename “Dallas”. This is an important step toward the empowerment of self-service BI tools. Microsoft  Read more

A few days ago Alberto released the version 1.1 of the Visio Forward Engineer add-in for Microsoft Office Visio 2010. I think it should be a standard feature of Visio, but you know, Microsoft priorities are not always aligned with our ones, and the “do-it-yourself”  Read more

A few days ago Kasper anticipated that I and Alberto will teach a 2-day PowerPivot course based on our PowerPivot book . The location will be next the Amsterdam airport, at Schiphol, Netherlands, and the dates are December 1st and 2nd, 2010. When we prepared  Read more

This topic is general and not related to a specific feature of PowerPivot. In the way it is designed today, when data are imported from a SSAS cube into PowerPivot, the dimensionality of the original cube is lost and a flat table is imported as the result  Read more

Every measure imported from a SSAS cube is imported as a Text column instead of as a Numeric column. This is very annoying because users are used to use SSAS data with rich metadata, and a measure is usually numeric. Moreover, the standard aggregation  Read more