Just got an invite from Microsoft Connect to download the November CTP of SQL 2008....you can, too! http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3BF4C5CA-B905-4EBC-8901-1D4C1D1DA884&displaylang=en

Last week I worked with a customer who wanted to give users the ability to create and subscribe to alerts for changing KPI Values. This is a pretty standard scenario, and one we covered with BSM 2005. However, with the “loss” of Notification Services in SQL 2008, PerformancePoint server does not include...

Today at SQL PASS, Dell and Microsoft announced a new set of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing solutions. They include a stack of server hardware, storage arrays, operating system, database and analytics software, management and reporting tools. The entire solution is based on the hardware and...

Get ready to download, because SP 2 was declared "ready to ship" last night. The SQL team is hoping to have it ready for public download Monday-morning-ish (PST).

Brian Welcker does it again! In this post he describes a situation that's been causing me a great deal of angst. Essentially, after getting MOSS/SSRS integration working, you get prompted to login when publishing from BIDS - and entering credentials doesn't get you past the dialog, either. I'm not...

As you may know, SSRS reports can use Integration Services packages as a source of data. This technique opens up some interesting possibilities around pre-processing data before it is rendered in a report. I’m going to take this one step further and describe how to pass the package parameter values...

Today I sat in on a SSIS performance tuning "chalk talk" given by Ashvini Sharma at TechReady, an internal technical education event. Ashvini mentioned that when loading relatively small amounts of data into SQL (he characterized small as < 1 GB), you might be better served using "good enough" BCP...