Darren Gosbell describes a useful technique to clear cache and execute an MDX statement using a single MDX command window. It’s very very useful when you’re doing performance tuning of your MDX script!  Read more

Microsoft released a short whitepaper about how scaling-out queries to a SSAS database leveraging on SAN snapshot features . It’s an interesting read if you have a SSAS database with many users and don’t have the time to copy a database on several servers  Read more

I fixed an issue of the DateTool dimension I presented in a previous post . The DateTool was unusable on OWC 11, which is the component used by BI Dev Studio and SQL Server Management Studio to browse a cube. I only added two statements in MDX Script  Read more

Alberto posted one of the patterns we use designing a dimensional model (this one is about the discretization of a measure into a dimension). We’d like to get some feedback about this solution: is there someone who used similar patterns? We consider this  Read more

Microsoft has released a valuable white paper with a self-explaining title: SQL Server Best Practices Article: Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services . The document has a part of explanation of  Read more

Year-To-Date and Difference-Over-Previos-Year (or Year-Over-Year Growth) are among the most required features of any user. Some OLAP client (like ProClarity) offers features that try to solve this problem client-side, but I don’t like this approach given  Read more

Sometimes there is a simple way to solve an issue. For example, if you want to color all measures (including calculated measures) in red when the value is negative, you can simply write: SCOPE ( Measures. AllMembers ); FORE_COLOR ( THIS ) = IIF ( Measures.  Read more

In the last months, I got the infamous “it’s by design” answer for many bugs/issues/irrational behaviors I posted to Microsoft. For most of them I used the Connect web site, in a couple of cases I opened a formal incident to Microsoft support. There are  Read more

BI Developer Studio does a lot of automatic changes when you change something. Each dimension is stored in a separate file, but many of the dimension informations are copied into cube files. When you modify a dimension which is already used by one or  Read more

SQLCAT (Customer Advisory Team) has announced the release of DMVStats . It produces a database (calling it data warehouse is very ambitious) that contains snapshots caught through Dynamic Management Views (DMV) of SQL Server 2005. You can see database  Read more