December 2009 - Posts

• Dimension cubes

  This is a quickfire blog post about a feature in Analysis Services that I have learnt about recently – Dimension Cubes. As of Analysis Services 2005 every single dimension in an Analysis Server database implicitly has a dimension cube created for it. Read More... Posted Thursday, December 31, 2009 12:14 AM by jamiet | 3 Comments Filed under: sql server, SSAS, dimension cubes, Analysis Services

• Standard Point-in-time and time-interval representations

  One requirement in any database implementation that I have ever worked on is that the notion of a point-in-time has to be represented in some way. The tool that I use on a regular basis, SQL Server, provides numerous datatypes that aid in the representation Read More... Posted Tuesday, December 29, 2009 12:25 AM by jamiet | 6 Comments Filed under: t-sql, sql server, datetime, ISO 8601, date representation

• Backing up Azure Table Storage

  I read with interest today a blog post from Yaron Goland entitled Do I need to backup/journal my Windows Azure Table Store? in which he spoke about the need to do exactly that i.e. Backup any data that you put into Windows Azure Table storage. Yaron's Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 23, 2009 2:34 PM by jamiet | 2 Comments Filed under: Azure

• OData gunning for ubiquity across Microsoft products

  There was lots of news that came out of Microsoft’s recent Professional Developer Conference (PDC) event however one item that may have slipped under the radar of many is that the data format specification for WCF Data Services (previously known as ADO.Net Read More... Posted Monday, December 21, 2009 1:17 AM by jamiet | 4 Comments Filed under: ADO.Net Data Services, OData, WCF Data Services

• Fun and games with Reporting Services expressions

  I have today been messing about with Reporting Services' expression language and as such have learnt a few things that I figured might be worth sharing. The report that I have been attempting to build has two parameters that define the effective reporting Read More... Posted Thursday, December 10, 2009 5:23 PM by jamiet | 6 Comments Filed under: sql server, SQL Server Reporting Services, expressions

• Unambiguous date formats : T-SQL Tuesday #001

  One of the most commonly used data types in SQL Server is [datetime] which unfortunately has some vagaries around how values get casted. A typical method for defining a [datetime] literal is to write it as a character string and then cast it appropriately. Read More... Posted Tuesday, December 08, 2009 9:23 PM by jamiet | 9 Comments Filed under: t-sql, sql server, T-SQL Tuesday, datetime, T-SQL Tuesday 001

• Project Houston

  Of late I’ve started to wonder about the direction that Microsoft may take their various development tools in the future. There has been an obvious move toward embracing the open source development community, witness the presence of open source advocate Read More... Posted Sunday, December 06, 2009 8:53 PM by jamiet | 7 Comments Filed under: sql server, SQL Azure, Project Houston, Silverlight

• TwitterCache now hosted on SQL Azure

  2012-06-07 Update: All good things must come to an end - I have now shutdown this server. I hope it was useful to some of you in the two and a half years that it has been available. Earlier today Brent Ozar blogged about how he had been archiving tweets Read More... Posted Thursday, December 03, 2009 11:41 PM by jamiet | 7 Comments Filed under: sql server, SQL Azure, twittercache

• Why you shouldn't open .csv files in Excel

  Open up Notepad Type the following: a,"This is some text" b,This is some more text Save the file as "test.csv" Open test.csv in Excel Without changing anything hit CTRL-S When prompted to keep the workbook in csv format say 'yes' Close Excel Open test.csv Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 02, 2009 2:55 PM by jamiet | 30 Comments Filed under: csv, excel