• Dynamic MDX in Reporting Services

    September 18th, 2008 in Analysis Services, Blog, Reporting Services, SQL Server

    After a couple of days off work last week with SQL Bits III and SQL 2008 Unleashed, it’s back to the grindstone this week; however before I get onto the serious stuff I’d like to say thank you to the organisers of both events. Watching you on stage headbanging to Rockstar – legendary! (You can see for yourself here and here…). Anyway, back to MDX… This post explains how you can build a dynamic MDX query in Reportins…

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  • Mosha's MDX Studio

    September 12th, 2008 in Analysis Services, Blog

    I almost feel embarrassed…, I’ve been writing this blog for over 9 months now, and I have yet to mention Mosha, although in my defence, there is a link to his blog in the links section to the right. As many/most of you may know, Mosha Pasumansky is one the key brains behind designing the MDX language and Analysis Services – nuff said? Over the last year he has been working on a pet project, MDX Studio. It’s an MDX query…

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  • SQLBits III and more…

    September 2nd, 2008 in Blog, SQL Server

    Next week we’re lucky enough to have a double-whammy of SQL events in the UK, has Christmas come early?… On Wednesday 10th September, Microsoft are running a live Technet event, SQL Server 2008 Unleashed, at their Reading campus. It looks like it should be a day well spent, with Prem Mehra delivering a keynote speech on large scale SQL Server systems, and other sessions including data warehouse improvements, upgrade paths, and a…

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  • Alex awarded Chartered IT Professional

    August 26th, 2008 in News

    We are proud to announce that Alex has been awarded Chartered IT Professional status from the British Computer Society. This reflects his history within the IT community, and the knowledge and experience he has accumulated over this time.

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  • Use Stored Procedure Output Parameters in SSRS

    August 5th, 2008 in Blog, Reporting Services, SQL Server

    It’s commonly known that there are a few frustrations when using stored procedures as the source for SSRS 2005 datasets, the inability to cope with temporary tables is always a key one, another is not being able to get at output parameters or return values. This post explains the easiest way to get at the output parameters and return value. Lets assume you are using the following stored proc: IF OBJECT_ID('myProc') IS NOT NULL DROP…

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  • Ranking results from MDX queries

    May 21st, 2008 in Analysis Services, Blog

    This post explains how you can create a ranking of data from an OLAP MDX query. This will take the results from the query, and assign a ranking to each row. i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd best rows etc. The first thing to do is to decide two things. 1) What measure do you want to rank by 2) What data set are you returning Let’s assume we want to rank all stores by sales value. The basic non-ranked MDX query would be something like this SELECT…

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  • SSRS Report Performance monitoring

    May 14th, 2008 in Blog, Reporting Services, SQL Server

    Today’s Frog-Blog top-tips are quite simple ones, but ones that I always find very useful. SSRS Report Performance monitoring. Once you start to build up a few Reporting Services reports, you need to find out how they’re performing, whether any particular reports are causing the server problems and even which users are running which reports. The following set of queries should point you in the right direction. They should all be run…

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  • Semi Additive Measures using SQL Server Standard

    April 21st, 2008 in Analysis Services, Blog, SQL Server

    One of the most frustrating limitations of SQL Server 2005 Standard edition is that it doesn’t support semi additive measures in SSAS Analysis Services cubes. This post explains a work around that provides similar functionality without having to shell out for the Enterprise Edition. What Are Semi Additive Measures? Semi Additive measures are values that you can summarise across any related dimension except time. For example, Sales and…

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  • Aramark Contract Won

    April 4th, 2008 in News

    Purple Frog have won a repeat contract with Aramark to design and supply a BI project for their newly won contract with NAAFI.

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  • Sky Anytime – Killing Kontiki

    February 8th, 2008 in Blog, Uncategorized

    I think it’s about time for a good old rant. Nothing to do with Business Intelligence, but… Anyone out there who uses Sky Anytime (and I believe the BBC iPlayer) will have probably noticed that they use a nasty peer-to-peer file sharing application called Kontiki, which they install automatically without giving you any control over. My problem is that I have a good 8Mb download speed but my upload is still a rather paltry 256K (I…

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