Since broadening my area of concentration and branching out from Microsoft Analysis Services to the broader Microsoft Business Intelligence Stack, I've encountered quite a few new challenges and opportuities. One of the more recent challenges was how...

I'm not entirely certain how widely known, but it is quite possible to use a PowerPivot Workbook as a data source for other client applications. For example, both Excel and Reporting Services can use a PowerPivot workbook named AdventureWorks.xlsx that...

A colleague, with whom I work on a regular basis, recently pointed out a somewhat unexpected feature of PowerPivot PivotTables. What my colleague was seeing was that when creating a PowerPivot PivotTable, placing a column from one of the Dimension tables...

I was recently onsite visiting one of my customers when a rather interesting issue was brought to my attention. The customer was running Reporting Services 2008 R2 in SharePoint Integrated Mode and was testing a very simple report that contained a single...

Every experienced DBA is familiar with the software equivalent of “Murphy’s Law” and the notion that if something can go wrong, it will. We all know that hardware can and does fail. Now that I think about it, that’s where I first...

Microsoft Analysis Services is a commonly used data source for Microsoft Reporting Services reports. The combination provides an environment for creating and rendering interactive reports that are highly performant, flexible and rich in functionality...

One of the more interesting aspects of being involved in supporting Business Intelligence applications is the opportunity to investigate behaviors that are either unexpected or perhaps not so intuitively understood. Proactive Caching is one aspect of...

At one time or other, just about every DBA charged with administering a Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services server has encountered a long running query that seems to consume machine resources with a voracious appetite. Those queries are typically executed...