I cut my DBA teeth on IBM's DB2 UDB EEE (enough acronyms) back in the 90's. I have always appreciated the scalability that is available with a MPP architecture. So a couple of years ago I was excited to hear that SQL Server was going to have a MPP architecture available. Now I am at SQLPass Summit 2011 and seeing the PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse) and ......

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/* EDIT - This problem has been fixed in the latest SQL Server 2008 R2 Cumulative Update package. It was identified that changing the aggregation design without reprocessing the aggregations prior to a ProcessUpdate on the dimensions causes this problem and it is a bug */ Many implementations require the use of ProcessUpdate to support Type 1 slowly ......

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Analysis Services has a useful feature called Usage-Based Optimization. This feature is used to design aggregations based on actual user queries using Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS). Information on how to configure (or disable) the query logging required for this is fairly hard to find. The Analysis Services Properties identified by ......

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One of the key performance concepts in Analysis Services is the design and use of good Aggregations to support user queries. However, Analysis Services (Both 2005 and 2008) by default is not configured very well to take advantage of multi-processor environments for parallel processing of these indexes, particularly for large MOLAP partitions. Keep in ......

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It is a well-published approach to using the EXISTING function to decode AGGREGATE members and nested sub-query filters. Mosha wrote a good blog on it here and a more recent one here. The use of EXISTING in these scenarios is very useful and sometimes the only option when dealing with multi-select filters. However, there are some limitations I have ......

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As I have moved forward with PerformancePoint I have made extensive use of queries for filter building. This approach has a couple of distinct advantages over the other options. Allows filters to be dynamic and pick up new data as it becomes available. One good example of this is a date filter. We use it to keep our filters as a dynamic set of n time ......

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I am currently sitting in a seminar on BI in the Cloud by John Welch at the PASS Summit 2009. SQL Server Azure looks promising for a variety of applications. Currently it only supports SQL Server relational database services but future plans to include the BI stack of SQL Server. I have yet to see how loading of data is handled and security is handled ......

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In PerformancePoint 2007 you have the capability to setup custom properties and pass them into dashboard objects. This is especially useful for simplifying dashboards where you are linking scorecard KPIs to report views. Alyson Powell Erwin outlines how to do this in the PerformancePoint MSDN blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/perfo... ......

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In my earlier post NON EMPTY Filtering on PerformancePoint Scorecard, I mentioned that you may be able filter scorecards and/or reports by dimensions that are not the same as the filter by using a cross join or other MDX querying technique. This is true if the other dimension is in the same cube as the query or member selection used by the filter. Consider ......

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I have had the pleasure (or pain, depending on your point of view) of working on several large data warehousing projects over the years and I have found that there are many key ingredients to a successful project. Most of these are well documented by Ralph Kimball and Bill Inmon so I won't reiterate those here. However, as an architect I have come to ......

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