Alex awarded Chartered IT Professional
August 26th, 2008 in NewsWe 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.
» Read moreUse Stored Procedure Output Parameters in SSRS
August 5th, 2008 in Blog, Reporting Services, SQL ServerIt’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…
» Read moreRanking results from MDX queries
May 21st, 2008 in Analysis Services, BlogThis 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…
» Read moreSSRS Report Performance monitoring
May 14th, 2008 in Blog, Reporting Services, SQL ServerToday’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…
» Read moreSemi Additive Measures using SQL Server Standard
April 21st, 2008 in Analysis Services, Blog, SQL ServerOne 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…
» Read moreAramark Contract Won
April 4th, 2008 in NewsPurple Frog have won a repeat contract with Aramark to design and supply a BI project for their newly won contract with NAAFI.
» Read moreSky Anytime – Killing Kontiki
February 8th, 2008 in Blog, UncategorizedI 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…
» Read moreExtract Datasource and Query from Excel Pivot
January 23rd, 2008 in Analysis Services, Blog, SQL ServerHave you ever tried to reverse engineer an Excel pivot table? It’s not as easy as you would think! Whether you just want to find out the datasource details, or identify the query that was used, there is just no simple way of getting Excel to tell you. The macro below will loop through every sheet in a workbook, and will document the datasources, SQL or MDX queries as well as the page, row, column and data fields. To use it, add it into…
» Read moreReport Parameter Selection Memory
January 11th, 2008 in Blog, Reporting Services, SQL ServerThis post explains a method of enhancing Reporting Services reports to make them more user friendly. I have been quizzed many times by end users who want reports to remember the parameter selections so that next time they run the report they haven’t got to re-select the same parameters. This is especially useful if there are a lot of long parameter lists, and each user tends to run the same selection frequently. This process is made…
» Read moreOpen SSRS report in a new Window
December 20th, 2007 in Blog, Reporting Services, SQL ServerThere isn’t yet a built-in facility within Reporting Services to open a report link (i.e. a drillthrough report) in a new browser window or tab, however it isn’t too tricky to get this to work using a bit of javascript. javascript:void(window.open(Destination,’_blank’)) My preferred method is to wrap this up into a custom code function such as Function OpenURL(ByVal URL As String) As String Return…
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