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 […]

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.

Is BI ready for Cloud Computing? Is Cloud Computing ready for BI?

The discussion today at the ITA BI Roundtable was “Is BI ready for Cloud Computing? Is Cloud Computing ready for BI?” It was a lively discussion, with participants from both BI Backgrounds and Cloud Backgrounds. We used this following materials to support the discussions: PowerPoint (with links to references throughout) Gartner’s Key Initiatives: Cloud Computing […]

Time (Not Date) Dimension Table SQL code

I am seeing more call for Time Dimensions. By that I mean Time-of-Day Dimensions. So now I have to retrain myself to call Date Dimensions “Date” and Time Dimensions “Time”.As a follow up to this post, here’s some DDL and a quick routine to generate a time of day table. The resolution is to the […]

Devils and Angels of BI Architecture

Devil: You don’t need to set up a separate star schema databaseAngel: Yes you do. We don’t want to interfere with the operational systemsDevil: It’s sooo much workAngel: We want to create a simplified schema to benefit our end usersDevil: Phooeh. ETL is BORINGDevil: Just query the source system directlyDevil: What could be better than […]

The “Million Dollar” BI Architecture Diagram

Anyone who has worked with me or taken training from me has seen some variant of this diagram. It’s not an original concept, although this version has been refined to include my personal experience with many Business Intelligence implementations, as well as my bias towards both the Kimball Business Dimensional methodology and using Microsoft SQL […]

Example Code to build and populate a Date Dimension

OK, I’ve found myself searching for this code a half dozen times over as many weeks. That tells me that I : a) Need to keep better track of my source code b) Need to share it on my blog Caveats & Comments: This is “warts and all” utility code. It could be optimized, but […]

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 […]