Category Archives: Software
Backing up SSAS – Yes or No?
A question came up recently about how to back up SSAS. The vast majority of my clients do not back up SSAS. This isn’t appropropriate for all deployments, though. Here’s the thread: This runs contrary to customary SQL server practice, … Continue reading
Microsoft on SSAS and BI Vision Roadmap
A lot of this has been floating around various blogs and press releases, but here’s a very succinct synopsis of where MS is planning to go with Microsoft BI and the BI Semantic Model.
Creating Dashboards WITHOUT SharePoint
As a business intelligence consultant, a frequent request I receive is to “create a dashboard”. One of the first things I do is verify that I understand what the client is actually asking for. Many times by “dashboard”, what they … Continue reading
MDX Query to show number of child members in a Dimension
I was validating some assumptions about my dimensions’ data distribution and hierarchies and wrote some MDX to confirm the number of members. You could also do this by writing a SQL query against the relational table, but in this case … Continue reading
Solution to “Very strange results from MDX Query”
The solution to “Very strange results from MDX Query” It turns out that there was both a psychological component and a technical one. The sleuth who help me discover these issues was none other than my friend, former and occasionally … Continue reading
Strange results from MDX Query
I am currently working on adding forecasting capabilities to an existing customer cube. The MDX to do this is based on calculations in an existing spreadsheet model. The spreadsheet works very well in terms of modeling the business accurately, but … Continue reading
Brilliantly stupid MDX debugging technique
Whenever I do something really stupid, rather than keep it to myself, I prefer to blog about it for the entire world to see. Even better – I came up with a debugging technique to save myself from my own, … Continue reading