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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Agile and Business Intelligence

I had a client ask me about some of the techniques we are currently using, “Tom, Can you send me authors, book titles and/or links outlining agile development (Story conferences, sprints, scrums, etc…).” This was my response: Here is the site that “started it all”: http://agilemanifesto.org/ I used this book: http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Data-Warehousing-World-Class-Intelligence/dp/0595471676 to acquire some of […]

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.

Join me for a Webinar: “Ad-hoc Scenario Analysis Using Existing Infrastructure”

Tom Huguelet Please join me Tuesday for “Ad-hoc Scenario Analysis Using Existing Infrastructure” April 19, 2011 12:00 p.m. ET / 9:00 a.m. PT http://bit.ly/gpyXpr Hosted by SQL Server Magazine, sponsored by Tableau Software. I really had fun creating this webinar. Gave me an opportunity to organize and clarify a lot of previous experience from Business Intelligence […]

April 2011 ITA BI Roundtable – So what can I do with this “BI” stuff anyway?

April 2011 ITA BI Roundtable – So what can I do with this “BI” stuff anyway? Here are the slides from today’s session.

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 mean is “lots of stuff all at once”. That’s when I pull out the tried […]