Business Intelligence

SQLBits 9 Session – PowerPivot and QlikView 101

Thank you to the SQLBits committee, speakers, helpers and attendees, for making SQLBits 9 one of the best yet. What a great example SQLBits is of the power of the SQL Server community coming together to help each other, and enjoy a few beers in the process! I was delighted to have my “PowerPivot & QlikView 101” session chosen by the committee, which I presented on Saturday afternoon. Thank you to all those who attended, great to…

SQL User Groups and SQLBits

SQLBits 9 It only seems like yesterday since the SQLBits crew put on their awesome 8th conference in Brighton. The next conference has just been announced, SQLBits will move to Liverpool for SQLBits 9 – “Query Across The Mersey” (…Really?!) between September 29th and October 1st. Registration’s not yet open, but you can find out more at www.SQLBits.com I’ve already submitted two sessions to present, “PowerPivot & QlikView…

Video: Automating SSAS OLAP Cube documentation

Automating OLAP cube documentation – SQLBits presentation For anyone that missed my presentation at SQLBits 8 in April, the video is now available here. In this 1 hour session I present a method of automating the creation of documentation for SSAS OLAP cubes by using DMVs (dynamic management views) and spatial data, querying the metadata of the cube in realtime. The results include the BUS matrix, star schemas, attribute lists, hierarchies…

The Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM)

I’m a happy chap. Why? Because I read a blog post yesterday by T.K. Anand (SSAS Principal Group Program Manager) about the vision and roadmap of Analysis Services. There were slightly concerning questions last November (following the PASS conference) surounding the future of Analysis Services, or more specifically the UDM, the dimensional model that we all know and love in SSAS 2005 & 2008. The arrival of PowerPivot into the Microsoft…

How to add calculations in SSAS cubes

One of the most useful aspects of a Business Intelligence system is the ability to add calculations to create new measures. This centralises the logic of the calculation into a single place, ensuring consistency and standardisation across the user base. By way of example, a simple calculation for profit (Income – Expenditure) wouldn’t be provided by the source database and historically would be implemented in each and every report. In a data…

Business Intelligence in the Cloud

The Cloud is pretty much top of the list of the corporate buzzword bingo phrases at the moment. It's clear what the benefits are from a SAAS perspective, but it's been less clear how the Business Intelligence world will start to make use of it.

Data Warehousing, Management Information, Cubes, Data Mining etc. all involve a lot of data, usually gigabytes or terrabytes even for medium sized organisations. Internet connectivity (speed and…

OLAP Cube Documentation in SSRS part 3

This is the 3rd and final post in this series of blog posts, showing how you can use SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), DMVs and spatial data to generate real time automated user guide documentation for your Analysis Services (SSAS) OLAP cube. Part 1 – Creating the DMV stored procs Part 2 – Create the SSRS reports Part 3 – Use spatial data and maps to create a star schema view Download Source Code UPDATE: I presented a 1…

OLAP Cube Documentation in SSRS part 2

In my previous post I described how to create a number of stored procedures that use Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) to return the metadata structure of an SSAS 2008 OLAP cube, including dimensions, attributes, measure groups, BUS matrix etc. In this post I’m going to use those procs to create a set of SSRS 2008 reports that will serve as the automated documentation of your cube. I’m going to make the following assumptions:…

OLAP Cube Documentation in SSRS part 1

Being a business intelligence consultant, I like to spend my time designing data warehouses, ETL scripts and OLAP cubes. An unfortunate consequence of this is having to write the documentation that goes with the fun techy work. So it got me thnking, is there a slightly more fun techy way of automating the documentation of OLAP cubes… There are some good tools out there such as BI Documenter, but I wanted a way of having more control over…