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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Update for Developers Training Course “Dependency Check Exception” “AuthorizationManager check failed”

Like many of us, it’s a constant struggle, er, — opportunity — for me to keep up-to-date on the latest and greatest techniques. One of the things that Microsoft and its partner ecosystem do particularly well is make plenty of materials available for self-directed study and skills renewal. If you haven’t already, check out the […]

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 […]