It seems that Microsoft will not improve the slow SCD component that is part of SSIS (at least, this is what I understand from this Microsoft Connect answer ). This means that TableDifference has a long life because it will be useful even in SQL Server  Read more

I just found that this query has different behavior (with breaking differences in result) with different builds of Analysis Services 2005. This is the query (I used a bitmap because this query throws an error when I try to put it in text in Community  Read more

Usually I don’t post something just to raise a question – but every rule has its exceptions. As you know, using surrogate keys is a best practice for a lot of reasons. Everything works fine with SSAS when you use surrogate keys with a plain star schema.  Read more

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