Thanks to a comment sent by a reader of my M2M paper, I just found a possible bug (or ''not supported by design feature'') of the CREATE LOCAL CUBE mdx statement. In short, it seems that a simple many-to-many dimension relationship is supported, but if you have a cube with multiple many-to-many dimension relationships chained together, this ...

Channel 9 has posted a lot of Business Intelligence screencasts. In case you are bored below is the list. Strangely enough they skip numbers Business Intelligence #01a: Introduction to Microsoft BI This screencast provides an overview of Business Intelligence including basic database design concepts, ETL, reporting and analytics. Business ...

A ranged dimension is a dimension that is used to have a discrete view of a continuous measure. A good example of this is the analysis of amount sold per order. In AdventureWorks we have, for each line of an order, the amount and quantity sold. We would like to divide orders in three groups (HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW) based on the total of the order. This ...

BI Developer Studio does a lot of automatic changes when you change something. Each dimension is stored in a separate file, but many of the dimension informations are copied into cube files. When you modify a dimension which is already used by one or more cubes in the same project, the editor automatically updates many of these informations. Each ...

I was reading the blog post ''My notes from Microsoft BI Conference'' by Vidas Matelis. It is a collection of notes recorded at different presentations, chalk talks etc. I felt that I agree with some of them, disagree with some, and have no opinion about some. I felt like it would be useful to write down my thoughts about these notes. Of ...

The short answer is yes. The long answer is that Microsoft should still improve in many ways. I thought about this many times before writing this post, because I want to be constructive and I hope that my words will not be misunderstood. My consideration start from the lack of a BI client. If Microsoft want BI for the masses, a low-cost end-user ...

Chris Webb has recently released a really interesting tool: MDX Script Performance Analyzer. It's a really interesting idea that will save me (and you) a lot of time trying to understand the root of a performance issue into an MDX Script of a cube. Thank you Chris, if I only had this tool three months ago! :-) Chris has also posted the news of an ...

I just posted this bug on the Microsoft Connect site. Please vote it if you think it would be a useful change. This is the issue description. If you set the''Aggregation Usage'' to true for an attribute of a dimension (i.e. Customer), you cannot run the aggregation design wizard on a partition of a measure group that is not linked to ...

I have been notified of this strange bug in Analysis Services 2005 that is easily reproducable. ******************************************************************PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS TEST ON A PRODUCTION SERVER! IT HANGS ANALYSIS SERVICES!!!****************************************************************** Open SQL Server Management ...

I was trying to find a way to repeatedly run the same MDX CREATE GLOBAL CUBE statement 70 times, building 70 different offline cubes for sales rep type folks to carry around for a client, and I just couldn't get it. I have some experience with SSIS, mostly from writing a tutorial on how to do RSS feeds with SSIS earlier that I am not sure ...