The project codenamed Gemini has an official name now: PowerPivot. The complete name should be “PowerPivot for Excel 2010”, but PowerPivot is simpler. I didn’t like that name yesterday, but today it seems better. Microsoft announced this name at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 held in Las Vegas. As usual, demos are good and people are ...

Today I had a big trouble with one customer. We migrated an AS2000 solution to SSAS2005, making a lifting to dimensions just to consolidate into attributes what were indipendent dimensions in the old cube. One of the old dimensions contained only one ''dummy'' member, and a series of calculated members. With Excel 2003, you had no troubles ...

Often end users use Excel to navigate into the cube. Then they may ask you to produce a report using the same data. It would be useful to get the MDX query used by Excel. Moreover, Excel 2007 offers a good MDX quality of the produced query against Analysis Services 2005 (much better than Excel 2003). I don't know why Excel doesn't have such a ...