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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: Gene Furibondo
Posted:
December 15, 2008 at 4:44 PM
So, we have kind of this inside joke on our team regarding Silverlight after I suggested to a few of the guys that I was going to rewrite the reporting services front end using Silverlight technology. Since then, I have often referred to Silverlight as the solution to any technical problem and offer solutions based purely on the technology. That is because I didn't really know what it was or how cool it really is or could be. Especially in the context of BI and data visualizations.
I wa
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By: Gene Furibondo
Posted:
October 19, 2008 at 7:31 PM
In most cases, the sticky filters employed by PerformancePoint dashboards are quite useful. In the situations where you would like to not retain the last user selections, it can be a bit difficult. For example, I deployed a dashboard with filters that were passed to an SSRS report contained in the dashboard. I did not want the report to run automatically, which it would do if all of its filters were applied. By forcing one of the filters to be blank, and not remember its last selection, the re
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By: Gene Furibondo
Posted:
October 13, 2008 at 10:06 AMRecently, I was deploying a PerformancePoint dashboard that consisted of both PerformancePoint scorecards and ProClarity PAS reports. It is a fairly straightforward proposition, except that when deployed, it looks pretty obvious that you have 2 different technologies or products at work here. In the interest of delivering the most consistent and uniformed user interface, I wanted to modify the ProClarity report to look like the PPS scorecards.
It took me a while and I am certain that there a
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By: Tom Huguelet
Posted:
October 3, 2008 at 11:53 AM
This tip has been around a while, but I still run into developers who don't know it, so it's worth a post.
If you ever need to test connectivity or compose a valid OLEDB connection string, try this:
Create an empty text file.
Rename the extension from TXT to UDL
Double click this file. The Data Link Utility appears
Back up to the Provider tab, make sure you have the correct Provider selected
Fill in the correct Connection information
Click "Test Connection"
This is a goo
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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: Tom Huguelet
Posted:
September 16, 2008 at 9:50 AMAccording to Greek mythology, Kerberos is the three-headed hound that guards the gates of Hades. It is also the industry standard security protocol that allows a user’s security context must be passed from their workstation to multiple back-end server machines, otherwise known as the dreaded, but essential, “Double-Hop” scenario. The “Double-Hop” enables the combination of many of the Microsoft Applications that work in concert, for example SharePoint, PerformancePoint, and SQL Server Analysis S
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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: Tom Huguelet
Posted:
May 7, 2008 at 10:29 AM
OK, I know the title of the song is Twist and Shout. When I played bass in my high school rock band, I was always amazed at how difficult it was to play this simple, 3-chord song really well. (I think it’s the syncopation). Sometimes the seemingly simple things have some added hidden intricacies.
Here's one of those intricacies in MDX, a question that comes up fairly frequently: How to create “OR” logical functionality. If you’re an experienced SQL coder, you’re probably thinking, “What
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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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By: Tom Huguelet
Posted:
February 13, 2008 at 4:20 PM
When populating dimension table records, I use Integer Identity columns to generate meaningless surrogate primary keys. I usually also create default “catch-all” records for “No Value Specified” or “Invalid Value Specified”
In other words let’s say my source data for a Gender Dimension looks like this:
Male
Female
<null>
Male
3
I would want to have a dimension table that looks like this:
-1
Invalid
0
No Gender
1
Male
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By: Tom Huguelet
Posted:
February 6, 2008 at 3:25 PM
I and most of my colleagues use Virtualization extensively for testing and demonstrations, for example with beta software or CTP's. Today I was using it for this Webinar.
About two hours before the Webinar, I was surprised to discover that my Virtual PC did not appear to be working.
I don’t know if anyone else has encountered this yet. This one was weird, but easy to fix once you figure out what’s wrong.
The symptoms: Virtual PC starts and an icon is created on the task bar. Howev
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By: Tom Huguelet
Posted:
January 28, 2008 at 3:23 PM
One of the most heated arguments I have ever witnessed in a business environment was over "tabs versus spaces", so it is with a small amount of trepidation that I post this link - I don't want to incite any flame wars.
I found an easy, web-based tool that allows me to consistently reformat SQL code here. I have no affiliation with the producers of this tool, except that I've used this tool fairly frequently over the past almost year. I've used integrated tools
It is fairly
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By: Tom Huguelet
Posted:
January 22, 2008 at 12:58 AM
This linked PointCast is the first of a series I will be doing about creating rapidly developed Dashboard Prototypes Using Performance Point Server.
We’re keeping these PointCasts brief in duration – about what you could listen to between train stops (for those of us on the Metra or “El”). After this overview, I’ll be posting these topics:
1. Overview [web / player]
2. Data
3. Set up a data connection
4. Define properties of that data
5. Create KPI’s
6. Create
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