Call today 0845 643 6463

Blog

  • Data Warehouse Presentation

    February 23rd, 2010 in Blog, SQL Server

    Purple Frog is presenting a session on data warehouse design concepts at the South Wales SQL Server User Group on Thursday 25th February 2010. If you’re in the area and want to come along you can register for free here. Eversheds are hosting the event in their Cardiff office. Adam Morton will be demonstrating an ETL control framework in SSIS, and Alex Whittles will be discussing the concepts of data warehousing and the fundamental…

    » Read more

  • Scope Problems with MDX Calculated Members

    November 18th, 2009 in Analysis Services, Blog

    We were recently investigating a problem for a client regarding the use of Scope within MDX calculated members. The code in question was similar to this: CREATE MEMBER CURRENTCUBE.[Measures].[Test Measure To Date] AS "NA", VISIBLE = 1; Scope([Date].[Calendar].MEMBERS); [Measures].[Test Measure To Date] = SUM(NULL:[Date].[Calendar].CurrentMember, [Measures].[Test Measure]); End Scope; Scope([Date].[Fiscal].MEMBERS); [Measures].[Test Measure To…

    » Read more

  • Excel 2007 and SSAS 2008 Error

    October 30th, 2009 in Analysis Services, Blog

    I was working on a new SSAS 2008 cube today, and came across an error which Google was unable to help with. I thought I’d post the solution here to help anyone else who may encounter it. The cube in question will be primarily be accessed using Excel 2007, so I’d been dutifully testing it along the way to ensure all was well. And then, after a number of changes the following error appeared when connecting to the cube from Excel to…

    » Read more

  • Style Sheets with Reporting Services

    June 14th, 2009 in Blog, Reporting Services

    Firstly sorry for not posting anything for a while, I can only blame spending too much time working and on my uni assignments – not much time free these days! I stumbled upon a great post by Barry King, demonstrating a way of applying database driven style configuration to a set of reporting services reports, in the absence of any style sheet support in SSRS. It doesn’t rely on custom code (most people’s favourite way of…

    » Read more

  • 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…

    » Read more

  • 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…

    » Read more

  • 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…

    » Read more

  • 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…

    » Read more

  • 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…

    » Read more

  • 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…

    » Read more