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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
October 20, 2009 at 2:20 PMCheck out my SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Posts:
1. SharePoint 2010 Insights - Reporting Services and Chart Web Parts
2. SharePoint 2010 Insights - Excel Services and Visio Services
3. SharePoint 2010 Insights - PerformancePoint Review Part 1 of 2
4. SharePoint 2010 Insights - PerformancePoint Review Part 2 of 2
Enjoy!!
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
October 15, 2009 at 4:51 PM
If you are like me you have spent a lot of time fighting with BIDS to get every connector within SSIS to line up perfectly straight...ahhhhh!!!
Thanks to Steve Jackson for this great tip on how to easily format and align all of the items within an SSIS package. I have fought with this before and had become excellent at holding down the CTRL key in order to slowly move items once I drag them close enough to almost make all the lines straight.
Can't wait to try this out! I wonder if th
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 8:22 PMExcel Services (Excel):
A new addition to Excel within Office 14 is Sparklines. Sparklines are an easy way to show a trend within a data set. Interestingly enough, even though these do look like a type of graph, they are simply conditional formatting! The new Sparklines can be found within the "Insert" tab of the ribbon as shown below:
There are three different types of Sparklines. The Line, Column, and Win / Loss. Once you have inserted some Sparklines into an Excel workboo
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 8:06 PM
Welcome to the second part of a two part blog series covering the functionality of PerformancePoint within SP2010. In the first part I covered the functionality of PerformancePoint specifically in regard to how it is integrated with SharePoint. In this part I will more specifically cover the enhancements to the PerformancePoint content such as Dashboards, Scorecards, Filters, etc. The topics for Part 2 are listed below.
Part 2:
General Enhancements - there have been improvements in ho
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 7:52 PM
I am actually quite impressed with the initial evaluation of the new functionality with PerformancePoint and SharePoint 2010 (SP2010). In a series of two blogs I will try to point some of the big changes and improvements that are going to be included with the release of SP2010, specifically in relation to PerformancePoint Services. Some of the topics I will cover within the two blog series include:
Part 1:
Ease of Installation - the setup to get PerformancePoint up and running is a lo
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 7:36 PM
Introduction:
I recently worked on a quick SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) project with a client that had a need to be able to query large datasets (potentially over 300,000 rows by 30 text columns wide). The report needed to be very dynamic, meaning that the report would need to allow the end user to run the report to return all of the data, or if they chose, filter on any of the columns to limit the end result. Not only this, but the query to pull the data needed to join to almost as
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 29, 2009 at 12:59 AM
Overview:
Oftentimes when developing a cube there will be a need to limit which dimensions and measures a user can view within the cube. For the purpose of this blog, the steps and processes needed to develop a solid security model are out of scope; however, I will offer four different techniques which can be used in order to test the cube roles once they are setup.
Ideas for testing roles come from my personal experience as well as from the book, "Expert Cube Development with Microso
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 1, 2009 at 7:57 PM
Done with Session 01 of the 24 PASS Webinar. This was by far the largest live meeting I have been a part of with over 450 users. I will not have time to write a complete review of all the webinars, however, I will add updates in this blog posts comments as I go along!
For the first session the sound did seem to cut out a bit, and some of the slides were a bit behind, but overall a good start to the 24 hour event. Taking notes the best I could as the webinar went along, these were the
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 1, 2009 at 6:53 PM
I am about ready to start my first of eleven meetings for the 24 hours of PASS webinars. I only have two webinars tonight with a break in between so I should have time to add updates as I go along.
It will be a little more difficult to add updates as I go tomorrow since I have meetings every hour from 4am until 11am, and then again from 2pm to 4pm. Even though the day is packed I should still have time to add comments to my blogs in order to quickly add updates (rather than write a full
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
September 1, 2009 at 1:54 PM
Starting tonight PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) will begin broadcasting webcasts for 24 hours straight. These webcasts include many topics, however, I am most interested in those surrounding SQL Server Maintenance and Business Intelligence. As of now I plan on attending at least 11 of these sessions (more depending on my ability to keep my eyes open!) which start tonight (9/1) and run every hour until the conclusion tomorrow night (9/2). Here is a list of all the webcasts
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
June 23, 2009 at 12:19 AM
Introduction:
In the scenario I am about to describe trusted accounts and domain accounts were used in order to allow Reporting Services to run in SharePoint Integrated mode. This was the initial installation of SSRS within the organization and needed to be done using trusted and domain accounts since SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) was configured in a multi-server environment without Kerberos enabled. It was our intention to provide functionality so that if a user was given access t
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
June 23, 2009 at 11:36 AM
Introduction:
There are a couple logical steps to take to troubleshoot any error or issue that arises while users attempt to access the SSRS reports from a report library in SharePoint integrated mode. If a user complains that a report does not properly render or that an error is given after clicking on a report there are a couple logical steps to take in order to quickly identify the issue and resolve it. Some steps that I typically take are listed and described in the following section.
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
June 23, 2009 at 10:19 AM
Introduction:
It is sometimes inevitable that data within an SSIS package will need to be loaded from flat files. If you have ever had to develop with SSIS you know that it can be quite finicky with its data types. I have found that it is sometimes even worse when the data is coming from flat files because the package would fail before I could even apply a data transformation within the data flow task. Below there is an example of a common error I get when working with flat files in SSIS:
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
May 15, 2009 at 10:47 AMThere’s a great scene in the movie Alien where Tom Skerritt’s character, Dallas, has a (somewhat eerie) conversation with the ship’s computer, named Mother. By conversation, I mean Dallas asks the computer questions and Mother responds with meaningful answers. Whenever I see it, I think of two things: I’m sure its not a mistake that, given the name of the computer, the room looks like a womb. One day, we will all interact with computers like this. You may understand why I thought of this afte
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By: Jeff Monnette
Posted:
April 18, 2009 at 10:07 AM
Did you know that SQL Server Analysis Services includes very powerful data mining capabilities that can help organizations find hidden patterns in their data and unlock the data's real value? These capabilities were introduced with Analysis Services in SQL Server 2000 and really came of age in 2005. With SQL Server 2008, Microsoft has introduced a new set of client tools that integrate with Excel and Visio to make using the data mining features easier than ever.
I recently gave a prese
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
March 30, 2009 at 1:54 PM
Introduction:
I was recently tasked with an interesting requirement from a client to use only SQL to break an unknown number of records into 7 different equal buckets or groups based on the total number of records returned by the query. Let's work through a simple example first before applying the SQL logic. This logic relies on the fact that the number of data groups is known ahead of time and does not change. Assume that we are given the following result set:
Record
Calenda
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
March 30, 2009 at 1:18 PM
Introduction:
I was recently challenged with creating a reporting database off of a lot of source tables that had no timestamp associated to any of the records. In order to allow for historical analysis of the data, the solution was to create an SSIS package that took a snapshot of the data each quarter. However, since the data in the underlying tables could change more frequently than once a quarter it was important to run the package every day so that reports would be up to date.
This wa
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
March 20, 2009 at 8:51 PMAnd I mean much faster. A few weeks ago, I posted about plotting all 48 continental U.S. states onto a Virtual Earth map. Due to some unfortunate performance issues with rendering complex shapes using the VE map control IE 7, it was necessary for me to simplify them using one of the new SQL 2008 methods for geography data types. By doing this, I was able to to get acceptable looking shapes in just under 10 seconds. Not bad. I'm happy to report that exact same query now renders the same shape
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
March 2, 2009 at 11:15 PMThere's a ton of material out there on the web by people who are plotting things like push-pins to Virtual Earth maps. But what has always interested me, and has always been somewhat of a struggle, is doing the same for complex polygons like U.S. States and counties. In fact, to date I haven't run into a single example out there of anyone working with large numbers of polygons, or complex ones at that. And I think for good reason. For starters, let's face it. Internet Explorer 7 doesn't have
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
February 18, 2009 at 4:14 PM
Introduction:
The Business Intelligence team at PointBridge was recently sent the following email:
Guys,
How would we do these:
1. Display on one dashboard only the KPIs that are red (or Y or G) from an entire SharePoint site collection (SC)
2. Display on one dashboard all KPIs in a SC that if the current trending continues will be red in a certain predefined timeframe (i.e. 2 weeks, 1 month). It would be nice to use a parameter to allow the user to determine the timeframe
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
February 16, 2009 at 2:48 PM
I have recently been sharpening up on my SSRS skills and I have decided to take time to share what I feel are some valuable tips and tricks.
This is a large list but can serve as a great resource to refresh your memory before starting any SSRS project.
General Design Tips:
1. Always use views or stored procedures for data sets. This can allow reports to continue to run properly even if a field is added to and underlying data source. Additional fields can also be added int
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
December 31, 2008 at 8:25 PMOver the past six months, I've been experimenting a lot with the Virtual Earth Map Control. I must say that I've been really impressed with the great community out there contributing guidance and code examples to help folks learn what this stuff is all about. There is a tangible level of excitement for this kind of technology. So in this spirit, I thought I'd throw in a few bits of my own work. My particular area of focus has involved loading shape data via an ETL process and plotting them as
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
December 23, 2008 at 2:36 PM
Overview:
I had recently been tasked to perform my first installation of PerformancePoint Monitoring Server 2007 onto a Server Farm. Most of my experience to date had been using the SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence suite (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, and PerformancePoint), however, I had not yet had an opportunity to do much of the actual configuration and / or installation. This was especially true for installations pertaining to Server Farms.
The hope of this blog is to help someone else tha
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
December 23, 2008 at 1:38 PM
Problem:
I was recently tasked with creating an SSIS package to pull data from a 32-bit version of Windows Server 2003 with an installation of Oracle 9i Database into a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 with an installation of SQL Server 2005. On the surface this seemed like a simple task since SSIS has built in Oracle data connections. However, this proved to be a lot harder than I could have ever imagined.
After initially having trouble connecting to the Oracle 9i Database I took s
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
December 21, 2008 at 10:12 PM
Over the weekend, I experienced some frustration installing the SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies. The last time I tried this for SQL 2005, I ran into problems caused by that fact that I use Windows 2008 Server (as a workstation) and have User Account Control enabled. This time, the issue was different and equally elusive. Fortunately, I learned of a better way to do this installation rather than using the GUI and hoping for the best.
It all started when
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
December 16, 2008 at 4:30 PM
In Part 1 of this blog I gave a theoretical overview of how to deal with slowly changing dimensions as well as some of the general advantages and disadvantages of each technique.
Moving away from the theoretical overview and more towards the actual practice of the theories, my first attempt to handle slowly changing dimensions was within SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) using Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS). Microsoft developed a Data Flow Transformation to handle b
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By: Mike Burger
Posted:
December 16, 2008 at 4:23 PM
Overview:
Although quite prevalent within the world of Business Intelligence, certain situations can still make handling slowly changing dimensions quite challenging. Just recently I had been tasked to deal with slowly changing dimensions in order to allow data within a dimension table to properly update while making sure to retain the history of the changes within the table.
For me the main challenge with handling the slowly changing dimension in this case was performance. No matter w
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
September 25, 2008 at 8:11 PMOften we here on the BI team at PointBridge need to document existing Analysis Services implementations. This can be somewhat time consuming, so we developed a quick PowerShell script that uses Analysis Management Objects (AMO) to iterate through all existing AS databases on a particular server an return some metrics to tab-delimited output.
## Add the AMO namespace$loadInfo = [Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.AnalysisServices")
## Connect and get the edition of
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By: David Greve
Posted:
September 22, 2008 at 10:59 PM
After recently deploying PerformancePoint Scorecards within SharePoint, we’ve noticed some client computers (end-users) could not connect to these scorecards. As an example, we have had a filter on the scorecard that would produce an error of: “No Selections available. Contact your system administrator for assistance. Contact the administrator for more details.” The scorecard also continued to say “Updating…”, after seeing this error on the filter.
While continue to diagnose this issue,
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By: Travis Nielsen
Posted:
September 6, 2008 at 2:15 PM
Creative title. I know. A few weeks ago, I ran into a frustrating issue with installing the Reporting Services Add-In for SharePoint. Basically the install package would get through most of the process and roll-back at the very end. The application event log would record the following: Log Name: ApplicationSource: MsiInstallerDate: 8/5/2008 12:16:16 PMEvent ID: 11708Task Category: NoneLevel: InformationKeywords: ClassicUser: CHIPBCTNIELSEN2\SharePointComputer: chipbctnielsen2.pbc.localDescript
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By: Ethan Matyas
Posted:
May 19, 2008 at 9:48 PM
Like many organizations, we have many different repositories for data within our organization. Some of our data sits in SQL Server for applications like Microsoft Dynamics SL and Microsoft CRM. Most of our other data sits in SharePoint lists which we use regularly for both internal and external collaboration.
From time to time, we need to mash some of this data for various analysis purposes. Many times, we use tools like the BDC to import data into SharePoint but we recently had a case where
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By: Talha Shah
Posted:
March 3, 2008 at 9:47 AM
Just follow the screen shots. I will provide additional information where needed.
Figure 1: Select Install Monitoring Server.
Figure 2: Of course, accept the terms if and only if you agree to them. Select Next.
Figure 3: Select Next.
Figure 4: Select Install.
Figure 5: Select Finish.
Figure 6: Select Next.
Figure 7: Select Next.
You should have most of the software in this list already in your environment. See links below for assistance with some of these c
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