A few months ago I wrote about a SSIS setting you have to use just to get better performance when you (fast) load data into a table with a clustered key. I and Alberto met Stefano Stefani at SQL Server Conference 2007 (an Italian conference where we were  Read more

I’m attending a session about SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 where I’ve seen one of the mostly wanted missing features of previous versions of Reporting Services: it is the Rich TextBox component, that can embed placeholders to compose text with data  Read more

With a strange move, today Microsoft released Katmai SQL Server 2008 CTP June without making a single word about this during the keynote of Bob Muglia. Why they waited the TechEd to make this announcement without highlighting the CTP availablility during  Read more

I just attended the session named “Applied Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services” held by of Teo Lachev . Teo developed a complex solution that allow an end user to build its own reports with financial data, using Reporting Services as a back-end  Read more

Today I wrote a procedure to drop all views from a schema (and the schema itself) in SQL Server 2005. I use views to expose objects to SSAS DSV and it’s useful having a cleanup code. Here’s the script: DropSchema drop all the views and the schema itself,  Read more

The short answer is yes. The long answer is that Microsoft should still improve in many ways. I thought about this many times before writing this post, because I want to be constructive and I hope that my words will not be misunderstood. My consideration  Read more

BIDS Helper is an addin for Visual Studio that really improves productivity developing solutions for Analysis Services. Today I tested it and looking for its feature I encountered a page describing the “Show Extra Properties” feature… and it links a  Read more

I and Alberto have posted a suggestion on Microsoft Connect to improve aggregation wizard behavior in a future version of SQL Server. The idea is to give an aggregation usage priority to dimension attributes for each cube or measure group. If you find  Read more

David Shroyer published an interesting paper about a Different Approach to Implementing Time Calculations in SSAS . It is something I would have found the time to write since Analysis Services 2000 (I have being using a similar approach since then) and  Read more

During the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference 2007 we distributed a free printed copy of The Many-to-Many Revolution to attendees who visited our booth. Now the same book can be ordered on Lulu.com paying only the print and shipping costs (we  Read more