I’m very happy to announce that my proposal for the Spotlight session I’ve been invited to deliver at PASS 2011 has been accepted! Temporal Snapshot Fact Table You are designing a BI Solution and your customer ask you to keep a snapshot of the status of all their documents (orders, insurances, contracts, bills...whatever the word ...

Three months ago I wrote a blog post entitled Some thoughts on Visual Studio database references and how they should be used for SQL Server BI where I shared some thoughts on a feature available to database developers in Visual Studio 2010 that I would love to see added to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis ...

Microsoft's new data platform vision for BI is called BISM - Business Intelligence Semantic Model.  While I focus primarily on manageability, availability and database engine features, I'd like to keep tabs on who can help you out with their input on the other aspects I rarely touch - Analysis Services (SSAS), Integration Services (SSIS), and ...

If you’re still unsure if the workshop I’ll deliver at PASS Summit the next November - “Creating a BI solution from A to Z” - is a good choice for you or not, you can get some more details reading the brief interview here: PASS Summit Post-Con Preview - Davide Mauri Where you’ll find answers to the following questions: Is there an audience ...

Over the past few weeks I have been making heavy use of the Database tools in Visual Studio 2010 (formerly known as datadude, DBPro, VSTS for Database Professionals or one of a plethora of other names that it has gone by over the past few years) and one of the features that has most impressed me has been database references.   Database ...

New Jersey SQL Server User Group (NJSQL) is bringing SQLSaturday #39 to NYC on April 24, 2010!  The free all-day training event will be hosted by Microsoft at their Midtown Manhattan offices.  The speaker line-up is growing fast—if you'd like to present, visit the event's open call for speakers.  This is a free full-day ...

I recently submitted a bug to Microsoft Connect concerning the behaviour of the expression language in SSRS, if you’re interested you can read about it here: DateAdd() doesn't throw an error when it has invalid parameters. I got a swift and detailed reply (for which I am grateful) from a fellow on the SSRS team however the content of it wasn’t ...

Even this year I will be a speaker at the European PASS Conference 2009 (April 22-24, 2009 - Neuss, Germany). Last year I had a session discussing the Many-to-Many Revolution paper.This year I'm excited to introduce the SQLBI Methodology joining Alberto Ferrari on the stage. We got a lot of feedback until now, but this is the first time we ...

Often I see developers on different forums asking how they can clear the SSAS cache. You can achieve this by restarting SSAS, which is done quite often. Restarting is not necessary though, it's possible to clear the cache of an SSAS database with an XMLA script. Use the script below and replace ''YourSsasDatabaseId'' with the ID of your SSAS ...

A lot of developers have SQL Server and its different services running on their PC or notebook to develop or test BI solutions. Unfortunately this slows down your system quite a lot. To speed things up when not using SQL Server, I used to stop and start each service manual quite often. Recently I found out that it's possible to start and stop all ...