I’m waiting for the next CTP (September 05?) because it should work with cascading many-to-many dimensions. In a previous post I talked about the lack of functionality when you have more many-to-many dimensions chained together (I named this scenario  Read more

First of all, a praise to Ralph Kimball : in the last days I read for the second time his The Data Warehouse Toolkit and this second read has been very inspiring to me. This time I’ve had the perspective of Analysis Services 2005 (SSAS) as OLAP target  Read more

Recently I’ve seen the multidimensional database that Visual Studio Team System use to produce statistics and reports about projects managed. There are several different cubes, each one with only one measure group, and many cubes use several dimensions  Read more

In these last busy two months I’ve seen many things that deserves to blog, but until now I hadn’t time to do it. But today I have 5 minutes to talk about the current BizTalk 2004 integration with Analysis Services 2000: this time I have some critics to  Read more

Analysis Services has a limitation of one distinct count measure for each measure group; in the past, it was a limitation for the single cube. Each distinct count measure cause an ORDER BY clause in the SELECT sent to the relational data source during  Read more

More than 2 years ago I posted on the microsoft olap newsgroup a bug on the QueryLog table that Analysis Services uses to log user queries (very important to make usage based optimization). A KB was supposed to be pending, but after two years and a service  Read more

My first period using SSIS in a real-world application convinced me that there is a lack of support in migration of SQL2000 DTS packages, expecially in a star schema transformation scenario. Most of my actual DTS packages are combinations of SQL Execute  Read more

May be it’s too late, but I think this requests (for SQL Server Integration Services 2005) could be scheduled at least for a SP1 if it’s not possible for the RTM. 1) Execute Task without debugger: it would be very nice to be able to execute a single task  Read more

In the last few days I tested several ways to generate surrogate keys when loading a dimension into a data mart. The classical approach with SQL Server is to rely on a INT IDENTITY column. It works fine, but you don’t know what surrogate key has been  Read more

I already opened a bug and written on newsgroup about this specfic scenario, but I still haven’t received an answer. This morning I met Chris Webb in Munich (I’m attending SQL Pass Europe ) and he told me that one year ago someone of MS told him that  Read more