Approaching SSIS (Sql Server Integration Services) from a DTS background one of the questions that comes to mind is: what is the better way to populate a fact table? Assuming you have a conventional star schema, you should have a fact table with two kind  Read more

SSIS has a feature I desperately wanted in DTS for years: you can use an external SQL file as a source SQL statement for the SQL Execute Task. Unfortunately this is not available for Data Flow Source component. I tried using variables to load the SQL  Read more

I just read the new SQL Server 2005 Features Comparison . Bad news on the last line: ActiveViews (officially named SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Report Builder , or simply Report Builder) will be delivered only within the SQL Server 2005 Enterprise  Read more

Thanks to Chris Webb I discovered this useful webcast about MDX tips & tricks (rightly named Common MDX mistakes & solutions). It’s available even the whole transcript, so you can read it instead to listen after midnight :-)  Read more

I just installed the Reporting Services SP2 beta on my dev-test machine. I had to search into beta newsgroups how to install SharePoint Web Parts onto my SharePoint Services installation: to do that, you need to start a command like: stsadm.exe -o addwppack  Read more

A new version of BI Portal Sample is available from Microsoft. It looks good, but I still haven’t tested it. Integrated with SharePoint and Reporting Services. Support of different localizations. It’s not the definitive solution, but may be useful.  Read more

Yesterday I lost at least an hour (but only for a coincidence I haven’t lose more hours) because I came across a bug of Analysis Services 2000. If you put a single quote or a double quote inside a comment, the whole MDX expression is not considered. I  Read more

The MovieClick demo is available on SQL Server Data Mining site. I think it’s very important to give us this kind of data to make serious test with data mining algorithms of SQL Server 2005. Thanks to the Data Mining Team!  Read more

Not a real BI topic, but today I discovered that you CAN NOT install SQL 2000 or MSDE on Windows XP via Remote Desktop. If you do that, setup hangs at a certain point, when it starts to execute some installation script on SQL Server. The MSDE setup display  Read more

After several years of using Analysis Services and SQL Server 2000, today I stumbled in this problem. I have a DISTINCT COUNT measure that have to measure how many different documents are present in a certain aggregation. Sometimes valid cells has no  Read more