Auto-provision embedded report delivery for your customers – Materials

Here are links to the follow-up materials and tutorials I mentioned during my recent presentation to the Atlanta Microsoft Business Intelligence Users, Auto-provision embedded report delivery for your customers The recording is available here The slides are available here The session covered a real-world case study and the challenges involved in bringing a Power BI […]

T-SQL Tuesday #136 – My Favorite Data Type

T-SQL Tuesday is hosted this month by Brent Ozar (blog|twitter). The subject is what is your favorite or least favorite data type. As Brent describes it, “Your mission: write a blog post about your favorite data type“. Following is my opinion for T-SQL Tuesday #136 – My Favorite Data Type. Around 2005/2007, I was charged […]

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DAX Duration Measure in Days, Hours, Minutes, Seconds

Credit where credit is due. This is an enhancement of the technique originally posted here by @konstantinos and @smoupre. A client needed a duration expressed in this format: 2 days, 05:03:52 In other words, Whenever the duration exceeds 86,400 seconds, express that portion in days, then build the remainder in hh:mm:ss format. This is the […]

Welcome (back) to my new (old) site

Somewhere around 2013 I was so awed by Microsoft’s Office 365 offering that I went “all-in” and moved my website to the then-nascent platform. Earlier this year the powers-that-be “sunsetted” the public-facing website portion of that product, so here we are, back in the open-source world. I’ve been stupendously lazy about my web-site over the […]

MDX for Date Formatting

This is a simple MDX snippet, but it comes up often enough that I think it’s worth a blog entry. A frequent question that comes up is how to format dates for display in MDX, especially in the parameter boxes on Reporting Services reports. The best practice is to let whatever front end you are […]

I am positive that measure is not negative – Weird Analysis Services Cube Behavior

I ran into a situation recently that had me stumped for a bit, and there didn’t seem to be any other posts about this when I searched. I was working with a cube containing a very straightforward measure. This was an integer column and used an AggregationType of SUM. No other calculations were involved. When […]

Simple way to test connectivity or compose OLEDB connection strings

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 […]

Windows 8 Hot-Keys

One of the best things you can do to get comfortable with a new OS is take some time to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Here are the Windows 8 Hot-Keys Windows logo key+ C Opens Charms bar Windows logo key+, Temporarily peeks at the desktop Windows logo key+. Moves the gutter to the right (snaps an […]

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, but : You may want to evaluate whether you back up the SSAS servers at […]