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 […]

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 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.

MDX Query to show number of child members in a Dimension

I was validating some assumptions about my dimensions’ data distribution and hierarchies and wrote some MDX to confirm the number of members. You could also do this by writing a SQL query against the relational table, but in this case I definitely wanted to see exactly what was coming from the OLAP dimensions. Here’s the […]

Solution to “Very strange results from MDX Query”

The solution to “Very strange results from MDX Query” It turns out that there was both a psychological component and a technical one. The sleuth who help me discover these issues was none other than my friend, former and occasionally current colleague, Scot Reagin. The technical issue: I was using FORMAT_STRING to format the numbers […]

Strange results from MDX Query

I am currently working on adding forecasting capabilities to an existing customer cube. The MDX to do this is based on calculations in an existing spreadsheet model. The spreadsheet works very well in terms of modeling the business accurately, but it’s a manually intensive process and does not recalculate automatically as needed. Perfect candidate for […]

Brilliantly stupid MDX debugging technique

Whenever I do something really stupid, rather than keep it to myself, I prefer to blog about it for the entire world to see. Even better – I came up with a debugging technique to save myself from my own, er, stupidity.The scenario is this: I am developing some SQL Server Analysis Services Date Calculations […]

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 […]