Creating great courseware

I was recently surveyed by Microsoft about the Microsoft Learning: Microsoft Certified Trainer program. One of the questions was about the Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC). I’ve been using MOC in one form or another for about 15 years. Although I was only answering a question in the moment, I grabbed my comment about how to create courseware into a text file, and it seemed […]

Fixing "Unexpected error occurred. Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt."

( If you don’t do hard-core Analysis Services, Reporting Services, or Integration Services development work with Microsoft Business Intelligence Development Studio, you can safely ignore this blog. ) On my workstation there was an incompatibility between Visual Studio and the SQL Server Binaries. Which led to this error: Symptom: Certain operations from Business Intelligence Development […]

Add-ons no MS Business Intelligence Developer should be without

The main two applications that are used for Microsoft-centric development are Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). There are a few add-on utilities that increase the power and usefulness of the out of the box applications. I find these invaluable: MDXStudio – the brilliant Mosha Pasumansky‘s take on how MDX development should […]

Quick SQL Server tip : Find references to table or column names

Many times I have to look within a database and find all the programmable objects that refer to a particular column or table name (any string really). There’s probably a slicker, more “politically correct” way to do this, but this is what I generally use to accomplish this: SELECT DISTINCT ‘EXEC sp_helptext [‘ + OBJECT_NAME(id) […]

Do as I say, not as I do

Perhaps that should be – Do as I say, not as Adventure Works and Project Real do SSAS modeling question: What’s the best approach to handling header/detail records? Approach #1) Use Measure Groups Approach #2) Consolidate via either ETL or relational operations Most clients I deal with have some form of Header/Details modeled in some […]

Ballmer and Muglia have it wrong

“It’s a poor carpenter who blames his tools.” I’ve been monitoring the twittersphere and blogosphere about the new BI tools coming from Microsoft. While I am excited about these new capabilities, the “buzz” around these things also creates some concerns. Over the past ten years, I’ve been fascinated by the persistence of the idea that […]

The unlikely entrepreneur

Have you ever found yourself doing something and suddenly realized, “Now I am a grown-up”? Like when you closed on your first home, bought something like a sump pump . . . I had the “Now I am an entrepreneur.” moment yesterday when I was ordering a toll-free number for my office line and had […]

Analysis Paralysis at Web (hosting) speed

Today I was doing research for the optimal hosting provider for my new business (ContextQ). I had fairly modest needs, but with anything that requires a commitment of time, or perhaps even more important, that technology works as intended, I am a stickler for research and especially customer reviews or testimonials. Perhaps I even go […]

Welcome! – and what this Blog is about

I chose “Information in Context” as the name of this blog for two primary reasons: It’s a central concept behind Business Intelligence, which is one of my main passions and endeavors. This is the idea that information really only becomes “Business Intelligence” when it has been imbued with the appropriate context. One might say that […]