September 2007 - Posts

• MDX Studio

  My backlog makes me late on a lot of announcements, but I'd like to post a link to the new MDX Studio by Mosha Pasumansky , because this is a very useful tool when you need to dig into an MDX query issue. There is a forum dedicated to the tool on SSAS Read More... Posted Sunday, September 23, 2007 8:41 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments

• MDX query with clear cache in a single statement

  Darren Gosbell describes a useful technique to clear cache and execute an MDX statement using a single MDX command window. It's very very useful when you're doing performance tuning of your MDX script! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg Read More... Posted Sunday, September 16, 2007 10:09 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments

• SSAS scale-out with SAN snapshot

  Microsoft released a short whitepaper about how scaling-out queries to a SSAS database leveraging on SAN snapshot features . It's an interesting read if you have a SSAS database with many users and don't have the time to copy a database on several servers. Read More... Posted Wednesday, September 12, 2007 11:10 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments

• DateTool dimension improvement

  I fixed an issue of the DateTool dimension I presented in a previous post . The DateTool was unusable on OWC 11, which is the component used by BI Dev Studio and SQL Server Management Studio to browse a cube. I only added two statements in MDX Script Read More... Posted Sunday, September 09, 2007 11:18 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 4 Comments

• Patterns of dimensional modeling design

  Alberto posted one of the patterns we use designing a dimensional model (this one is about the discretization of a measure into a dimension). We'd like to get some feedback about this solution: is there someone who used similar patterns? We consider this Read More... Posted Thursday, September 06, 2007 11:48 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments

• MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SSAS 2005

  Microsoft has released a valuable white paper with a self-explaining title: SQL Server Best Practices Article: Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services . The document has a part of explanation of Read More... Posted Monday, September 03, 2007 6:38 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments

• DateTool dimension: an alternative Time Intelligence implementation

  Year-To-Date and Difference-Over-Previos-Year (or Year-Over-Year Growth) are among the most required features of any user. Some OLAP client (like ProClarity) offers features that try to solve this problem client-side, but I don’t like this approach given Read More... Posted Sunday, September 02, 2007 4:41 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 5 Comments Filed under: Analysis Services, MDX, Excel PivotTable "Analysis Services", Excel 2007, BIDS, BI Developer Studio