Hi, today is my last day at Microsoft. I am moving back home to Vancouver, BC. I won’t be allowed to post to my MSDN blog any more, so I found a new home at http://cathydumas.com/ . You can watch there for updates.  You can also contact me through...

About a year ago, I read a profile about Hans Rosling in the Economist magazine . Apparently I had been living under a rock, as I had never seen his data visualizations before. Pretty impressive: Rosling made sure all his information was put up publically...

In my previous post about impersonation , I mentioned that DirectQuery impersonation was a bit tricky. That is because there is a special project property called Impersonation Settings that determines the credentials to use when connecting to the data...

If you look at my previous post on the tabular project structure , you’ll see this teaser: “There are a couple of other files in the project folder, an optional ABF file and a hidden user settings file, but I’ll talk about those another day.” The ABF...

If you look in the metadata of a BIM file, or if you look at the .dax file generated by the DAX Editor , you will see the following perplexing comment: -------------------------------------------------------- -- -- PowerPivot measures command (do not...

You’ve run the import wizard, and imported a bunch of tables into your tabular model. Now you want to import one more from that same connection. How do you do this? What you need is the Existing Connections dialog. To start the Existing Connections dialog...

Now that RC0 has arrived I can finally post about security for tabular models. I have put off writing about security because I think the RC0 documentation on this subject is really quite good so I don’t have too much to add. Also, we had a minor feature...

If you look carefully, you can see my roots showing. No, not my hair – you can see my old job showing. When I came to work on the Analysis Services team, we had to design an “environmentally friendly” Visual Studio package in a hurry using the Visual...

In PowerPivot, the Edit Table Properties dialog box is used for a few things. It is used to add columns to a table, remove columns from a table, and adjust the set of rows included in the table. This works great for PowerPivot. All the data in the PowerPivot...

Here is a pop quiz on impersonation when connecting to a data source for tabular models. Question 1: How many impersonation options are supported for tabular models? 2, as shown in the tabular designer 3 4, as shown in SSMS Question 2: My impersonation...

Sometimes people ask me for the slide deck to my PASS presentation . I send out the deck, but there is only one slide in there that is worth anything. This post summarizes the only useful slide in the entire deck. Let’s think about this question – why...

Case sensitive, that is. Last year, Denny Lee posted about PowerPivot’s case insensitivity problem . Tabular models have the same insensitivity problem by default. As I mentioned in my previous post on language and collation settings , when creating a...

Collation and language settings are tricky; so tricky that my two planned blog posts on this topic can only scratch the surface of what goes on under the covers here. This post is a simplified overview of collation and language settings for Denali. In...

When I was at PASS I fielded a bunch of questions about the BI semantic model, multidimensional (OLAP), and tabular (VertiPaq) models. I think there is some confusion about what the BI semantic model, multidimensional, and tabular models actually are...

Hi, today at my PASS session I gave a demo of a DAX Editor. This is a sample written by three testers on the Analysis Services team - Nick Medveditskov, Karen Aleksanyan, and Sergey Volegov. We will making this sample available on CodePlex as soon as...

I am spending the next couple of days getting ready for PASS Summit 2011 . I have a session on Thursday afternoon, 3 PM, on Developing and Managing a Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM) in SQL Server Code Name “Denali” Analysis Services . The...

It is possible for the tabular designer to get into an error state. If you try to save the model, you can get this error message: “Unable to save the file Model.bim. Reason: The file cannot be saved because it is marked as readonly.” Most of the time...

Marco Russo has a nice post about the basics of configuring the workspace database server . You can use his post to learn how to set the tabular instance to use for the workspace database server for new and existing projects. However, there’s more to...

The Office ACE provider is used to import from text files, Excel files, and Access files. Just like for any data provider, you need to install the provider on both the client side (machine with BIDS) and on the server side (both the machine running the...

With a new storage engine comes new processing options. Here are some fast facts about processing tabular models, in Q&A format. What are my processing options? The following table shows the available processing options for each object. ...

By default, when you open the .bim file after closing it, the data comes back. Did you ever wonder where this data comes from? It depends on a number of factors. Let’s explore. Before we begin, I want you to keep a very important point in mind. The metadata...

We have this Data Backup property on the .bim file that by default is turned off. You may wonder why this property exists. Let us explore what it is this property does, and why it (and backups in general) are useful in the tabular designer. The Data Backup...

In my DirectQuery 101 post, I promised an example of configuring a model with DirectQuery only partitions. Here it is. Imagine for a moment that AdventureWorks has turned into a fast moving mega-conglomerate, with transactions written to FactInternetSales...

Managing tabular models is pretty much like managing multidimensional models. We have a full array of tools available for you to use. Here is a summary. SSMS SSMS has the backup , restore , attach , detach , delete , and synchronize features that you...

The astute user may notice that the Analysis Services tasks included with Integration Services in BIDS are unchanged for Denali. That is true. The good news is that you can use Integration Services with tabular models. Because the underlying structure...