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I’ve just gone through an informal and limited evaluation process for a charting tool for a BI dashboard.  It included some of the RS extension products, ProClarity and ChartFX.  Of course I would have been keen to use ProClarity, but in this case the cost was a little high and, to be honest, it would have been a sledgehammer to ...

This article was originally written for Analysis Services 2005, but everything still applies today even for Analysis Services 2012 in Multidimensional mode.First thing to do: figure out what type of currency conversion you need.  There are 3 types. MANY-TO-MANY.  This is where the facts are stored in multiple currencies – i.e. ...

 Oh, and before the anoraks out there mail me saying “did you know that ‘performant’ is not recognized as an adjective by the major dictionaries?”, yes I do know – but I like the word, so I’m using it! We are modeling the business of the Multi-Dimensional Parcel Service (MDPS). They ship parcels ...

It is generally considered data warehousing best practice to split your facts into different tables if the granularity/dimensionality is different.  This is a very common question in data warehouse design.  Consider the following data model.   The company traditionally sells its products through sales people visiting customer ...

I’m approaching the end of an enjoyable data warehousing project and we have collected some size/volume statistics around our Analysis Services 2005 cube.  We have: * 48 Dimensions.  This includes role-playing dimensions.* 751 Attributes and user hierarchies (!).  So if a dimension has 5 attributes and 2 user hierarchies, ...

There are differing approaches out there on how best to get a current period member in MDX.  It is often a requirement to show, for example, [Current Month] and [Current Month - 1] members side by side and then perform comparison calculations between the two.  This allows OLAP reports to dynamically refresh the numbers when a new period ...

A colleague of mine once asked me to do a “Number of Days since Last Incident” calculated measure (sounds like fun!).  Basically, he had a measure called Incidents and wanted a running count of days since the last incident. E.g.Date        Incidents        ...

I am naturally interested in MDX stored procs so I tried them out.  I have often wondered how they compare to SQL CLR.  I hereby commit myself to (trying to) do a few blog posts in this space!  Here are some findings regarding when to use them.It is well known that the strengths of SQL CLR for real-life scenarios are as ...

If you're interested in BI solutions on the Microsoft platform and you have nothing better to do then you could do worse than readig a couple of whitepapers that I have recently encountered: ETL Performance: Unisys and Microsoft SQL Server Speed Up The Process - Understand how 64-bit computing can dramatically increase performance of ...

One of the key goals of Analysis Services 2005 is to “bring together the best of both relational and OLAP reporting into a single Unified Dimensional Model”.  This is a very ambitious goal and most would agree that it would be difficult to fully achieve.  However, Analysis Services 2005 certainly does take huge strides in ...