As announced during the PASS Summit 2011 Day One Keynote , we are diving deeper into the world of Big Data by embracing and contributing to the open source community and Hadoop. We’ve had a lot of good coverage on this topic with some examples below. Microsoft Expands Data Platform With...

by Denny Lee As many of you know from the various blogs, whitepapers, and conferences from SQLCAT, there is a big obsession or compulsion toward I/O by various members of SQLCAT. If you’re not already familiar with this topic, definitely reference Mike Ruthruff ’s whitepaper Predeployment...

by Denny Lee (SQL Customer Advisory Team), Daniel Yu (SQL Marketing) Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of questions, tweets, and rumors about the SSAS Maestros program – some notable blogs include Kasper de Jonge’s Do you have what it takes to become SSAS Maestro and Vidas...

Author: Thomas Kejser Reviewers: Peter Adshead, Nicholas Dritsas, Sanjay Nayyar, John Desch, Kevin Cox, Akshai Mirchandani, Anne Zorner In this blog we will describe an important optimization that you should apply to cubes that are processed often and have CREATE SET commands in the calculation script...

Gemini is the code name for the new breakthrough Self-Service Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities being delivered in the SQL Server 2008 R2 release. Gemini enables end users to build BI applications by integrating data from a variety of sources, modeling, refining and analyzing the data, adding business...

In data warehouses, it is quite common that fact records arrive with a source system key that has not yet been loaded in the dimension tables. This phenomena is known as “late arriving dimensions” or “early arriving facts” in Kimball terminology. When you see a fact record that cannot be resolved...

Some customers prefer to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 by detaching all databases from their SQL Server 2005 instance and then reattaching them to a completely new SQL Server 2008 instance. If you choose this upgrade strategy, you should be aware that you cannot detach an msdb database from a SQL...

If you have experimented with cube design in SQL Server 2008, you will probably have run into the new AMO design warnings in Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 (BIDS). We find that these warnings help customers a lot: they allow them to quickly analyze your cube for classic design mistakes...