There is a new paper on project REAL available: this one cover the hardware class tuning for an Analysis Services database of hundreds of Gb. My first impression is good: it is useful to have a reference for benchmark analysis.  Read more

I just posted this bug on connect.microsoft.com - there is an issue when you use unary operator in a parent-child dimension combined with a many-to-many relationship. The problem is that the '+' operator on non-leaf nodes seems to not consider the children  Read more

Two days ago I did the 70-445 exam in beta (TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence - Implementation and Maintenance). I cannot talk about the exam content, but I think I can talk about the exam in general. As usual, an exam allows you to  Read more

My experience with the term "add-in" was that you have a piece of software put on top of a bigger software, just to enable some little functionality. Today at SQL Pass 2006 I've seen how this term has to be redefined. The Data Mining Add-ins for Office  Read more

I am here in Seattle attending SQL Pass 2006 . If you are around, feel free to stop me and say hi: I really like to meet blog readers and people who read my many-to-many paper . Let's contact me if you want to set a meeting place.  Read more

I still hadn't time to install the SP2 CTP but I just read this post and I think it's a very interesting thing! The VARDECIMAL could be an amazing feature! I encountered several times huges fact tables that have many NUMERIC measures. If the VARDECIMAL  Read more

Here is available the SP2 CTP for SQL Server 2005. The what's new document explain that there is an improvement in many-to-many dimension relationships calculations. I will try to evaluate the performance improvement, but unfortunately I'm in the middle  Read more

This is not the first time I found non-intuitive issues with collation, Unicode and 8-bit strings with SQL Server, but this time I discovered (more precisely: one of my customers discovered and asked me...) a strange behavior that affects the query plan  Read more

I just added two suggestion items to my feedback for SSAS2005. The first suggestion is about the perspectives: it would be useful to select member filters and default members on each single perspective. Another important thing could be to be able to rename  Read more

I am trying the beta of SQL Refactor (available here ). It is really helpful to refactor the layout of a query and I like to do this in at least three scenarios: when I read a query written by other people, when I need to modify a query in a Reporting  Read more