Today I implemented a classification through a NTILE equivalent function. The T-SQL NTILE implementation has very bad perfomance when used against large datasets of rows, so I and Davide Mauri realized a better implementation that Davide posted some weeks  Read more

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

I'm trying to use SqlBulkCopy removing a C++ DLL I wrote two years ago to create staging tables in SQL Server from remote databases, dynamically creating queries to get data basing on table structure I defined into the staging database. This tool helped  Read more

The news is that Microsoft announced it has agreed to acquire ProClarity . Now a decent client for Analysis Services 2005 will be available from Microsoft, and I hope that a new commercial licensing scheme will allow to small companies to get a mixed  Read more

I recently had some problem with memory configuration of SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 and I'd like to share lessons I got. This post is a replacement for my previous post , that I striked to keep history of some bad assumptions I initially made.  Read more

I recently discovered a few pitfalls on memory configuration of SQL Server Analysis Services 2005: the main problem is that the default configuration (written by setup) doesn't consider the actual physical resources (mainly RAM) of your server and this  Read more

Thanks to Romeo Pruno , I just discovered a sample of Excel 2003 customization to access OLAP data through task panes. While this article deserves to be read, I think that client customization is a sort of "last resort", to be applied only for particular  Read more

Thanks to a blog reader, I just discovered that if you create a Report Builder Model from a UDM and try to create a report filtering a date field, the date you specify in the filter dialog box is inverted (months with days) when the MDX query is generated.  Read more

I just discovered that some weeks ago Microsoft released a cumulative upgrades of hotfixes for Analysis Services 2000 released after SP4. I have to say that I noted AS 2000 is less stable after SP4 intallation (I can say that after months of use) and  Read more

Tonight I've studied how to improve performance of SCD transformation task of SSIS. I started from the consideration that in an actual SSIS package, the dimension processing is at least one magnitude slower than fact table processing; most of the time  Read more