The upcoming book Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning that I wrote with Marco is its final stage. You can see the final update through the “ Rough Cuts ” initiative by O’Reilly. The book will be available in bookstores in the first  Read more

Most of my database model are written with Visio. I don’t want to start a digression whether Visio is good or not to build a simple data model: Visio is enogh for my modeling needs and customers love its colours and the ability to open the model with  Read more

Having the need to execute a package on a remote server, I discovered  that DtExec has no option to launch the package remotely (something that everybody apart me already knew…). So… time to write some code. I wrote a WCF Service that executes a  Read more

In the endless search for optimal performance in Bulk loading data, I have written a paper which describes how to reach top performance using the SqlBulkCopy class in .NET, trying to find the best combination of its parameter settings to load heaps, clustered  Read more

Using SSAS 2005/2008, there is no way to apply security to DRILLTHROUGH actions, so we cannot decide whether a specific user is authorized or not to perform a specific action. This is a “by design” behavior, since DRILLTHROUGH actions are initiated at  Read more

Today I ran into a nice misfeature of SSIS that worths sharing. If I want to use SSIS to sort a flow of data, containing both lowecase and uppercase strings, I would expect a standard behaviour or, at least, something with some “common sense”. As I am  Read more

Guys, I’m excited of being a speaker at the European PASS Conference 2009 (April 22-24, 2009 – Neuss, Germany). I will present three sessions, on Slowly Changing Dimension Handling, OLAP partitioning with SSIS and scripts and, most interesting (at least  Read more

Reference dimensions let you create a relationship between a measure group and a dimension using an intermediate dimension to act as a bridge between them. In the Adventure Works demo, for example, they are used to link reseller sales and orders to the  Read more

The security model of SSAS prevents us to apply security limitations to calculated members. We can hide physical members but we have no means to hide calculated members to any role. By preventing access to the physical measures, the user will not be able  Read more

It is several years now that I and Marco Russo enjoy ourself developing BI solutions and teaching our customers how to build them. We started with Kimball methodology, then we tried Inmon’s one and finally a mix of both, tailored to ours and our customer  Read more