Russell Christopher's Semi-Useful BI Musings : PerformancePoint

Language Packs and the PerformancePoint add-in for Excel

russch — Sun, 18 May 2008 20:48:00 GMT

Here’s an interesting behavior I saw being discussed that you may run into when launching the PPS add-in for Excel when you have (or not) language packs installed:

The PerformancePoint Add-in for Excel could not be loaded. The language pack for the configured language could not be found. Please install the multilingual user interface pack for your version of Office or set the operating system locale to the same locale as that set for Office

The add-in always wants to see that the regional settings of your operating system and Office are the same. OK, good so far. The add-in also expects (I’m not sure why) those settings to use the core language, too. In other words, German (Germany) or Spanish (Spain) are good, but German (Austria) and Spanish (Peru) are not – stinks if you’re in Peru or Austria, eh?

Never fear, because there’s a workaround can you use to deal with the behavior above - Just make sure that you have the language packs for both locales (German (Germany) and German (Austria), for example) installed on the machine. You can use http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/win2k/setup/lcid.mspx for locale-specific information, by the way.

…But what happens if the locale you want to use, like German (Austria) doesn’t even have a language pack? Well, there’s a solution for that, too:

1. Install the language pack for your “core” language on the machine in question – German (Germany) will lay down C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\1031

2. Create a copy of the folder above (including all the files inside it), and then rename it to the correct LCID value (use the link above to determine what the value is). For German (Austria) we’d create C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\3079.

At this point, you should be in pretty good shape.

PerformancePoint: Why can’t I see values for my KPI’s Actual and Target metrics in a scorecard?

russch — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:54:00 GMT

While working on a KPI in PPS, I found that after binding an Actual and Target to my cube I couldn’t see values for these metrics after adding the KPI to Scorecard and updating. The indicator image these metrics showed was “No Data”.

I broke out ProClarity to make sure that data existed, and it did.

Turns out the culprit was another Target that lived in the same KPI – I had written an MDX tuple formula for it, and fat fingered the MDX itself. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re not verifying MDX syntax, so the UI happily accepted my “bad” MDX, which subsequently caused all data values in the KPI to die. After correcting my MDX, all was well.

Fun displaying SSRS (integrated) reports using PerformancePoint SQL Server Report viewer

russch — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 17:50:00 GMT

Disclaimer: the post below was written after 24+ hours traveling to India - I was pretty much (very much) out of my mind at the time...

I just spent more than a few minutes messing around with the “SQL Server Report” report viewer in PerformancePoint, and choosing correct values for the Report Server URL and Report URL properties when in SharePoint Integrated mode isn’t, uh…exactly intuitive.

First, a gripe - the Server mode option: You have two choices, “SharePoint Integrated” and “Report Center” modes. Report Center mode? What in the world is that!? As far as I know, there is no way to get a SSRS report to show up in Report Center unless it is already saved in MOSS. So, “Report Center” mode means “SharePoint Integrated” mode to me. It would have been nice we used the same names for these choices (native and integrated) as we do in the SSRS docs! Bleech!

Specifying the Report Server URL is straight forward. Just drop in the location of your Report Server web service, like: http://someMachine/reportserver.

Plugging in the Report URL value is a bit more troublesome. I tried the standard strings like “/ReportLibraryName/ReportName”, etc. Each attempt failed with:

Unable to find report specified by URL. Please verify that both the Server URL and report URL are correct

I finally got sick of plugging in values, and just surfed to http://myMachine/reportserver and browsed to the report in question:

1. Hit the http://someMachine/reportserver vdir of your SSRS installation.

2. Drill down into the folder (in my case http://bi-vpc) that was created when you configured SSRS/MOSS integration and started saving reports. See the screen shot below.

3. Open the folder which represents your Report Center (in my case, “Reports”).

4. Click the link which represents your report library (“ReportsLibrary” for me).

5. Note the name of your report, and don’t forget the .RDL extension at the end!

Put parts 2-5 together, and you have the string you need to plug into Report URL (http://bi-vpc/reports/reportslibrary/CompanySales.rdl - see the screen shot below).

Sheesh – could we have made this any more difficult?

What does an exported PerformancePoint scorecard look like in Reporting Services report designer?

russch — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:03:00 GMT

I was curious what would happen when I opened an RDL file created by PerformancePoint in Report Designer, so I tried it.

Here is what I discovered:

1. For whatever reason, PPS exports RDL using the SSRS 2000 RDL spec (xmlns=http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2003/10/reportdefinition). When you attempt to open the report up with BIDS, you’ll be prompted to upgrade it.

2. If you click the Data tab, you’ll hit the error: “The designer extension ScorecardDPE could not be loaded. Check the configuration file RSReportDesigner.config”

I found there were two ways to (sort of) solve the second problem.

The first workaround is rather old-fashioned. Just keep clicking OK 3-4 times and the error message eventually gives up. Then, switch the query designer into generic mode and dismiss the error message you get there 3-4 times. After that you can run the query with the “!” button, and things work.

If you want to be a little bit more creative, go ahead and edit (carefully, of course) RSReportDesigner.Config. You’ll find the file in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies, and you’ll want to place the following element in the <Designer> block of the file:

Extension Name="ScorecardDPE" Type="Microsoft.ReportingServices.QueryDesigners.VDTQueryDesigner,Microsoft.ReportingServices.QueryDesigners" />

If you go this route, you’ll STILL get an error (“Format of the initialization string does not confirm to the specification starting at index 0”), but you only have to dismiss it once at which point you can go into the generic query designer mode (without additional generic query designer errors to get rid of).

Both solutions aren’t perfect, but then we don’t live in a perfect world, eh?

In terms of modifying the report layout itself, you can change the header colors from “Office 2007 Blue” to whatever you’d like, remove any of the Value, Goal/Status, Trend columns, etc.

Minor idiosyncrasy exporting a PerformancePoint Scorecard to SQL Reporting Services

russch — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:29:00 GMT

Today I started playing around with the ability to export/deploy PPS scorecards to SSRS: It’s actually a pretty cool piece of work! I did run into one problem up which I’m documenting here to save someone else some time.

I wanted to deploy my report to the root of my SSRS server’s home folder, as I normally use this area to dump temporary objects. So, I typed in the obligatory “/” symbol to represent “root”.

When I tried to deploy, DD wouldn’t cooperate, telling me:

Could not connect to Reporting Services. Contact an administrator

Turns out you can’t deploy right to root unless you first save the report from DD as an RDL file and then manually import it using Report Manager. When I specified a real folder name (“Adventure Works Sample Reports”, for example) in the Deployment Folder text box, everything was peachy. The status message we get back doesn't really help too much, either - a bit too generic.

How to really, really remove PPS Dashboard Designer

russch — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:15:00 GMT

The Microsoft Knowledge Base article 941749 explains (among other things) how to remove PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer. However, it appeared to me that the steps (“Method 1” and “Method 2”) were semi-cosmetic : We’re really not explicitly told how to remove the actual bits from our machine.

Step 4 of the article holds a clue:

4.	Delete the cache files that are used by PerformancePoint Monitoring Server 2007. All related files are in the following folder: C:\Documents and Settings\User_Name\Local Settings\Apps\2.0

However, I found it was bad to be too quick on the gun. I renamed a few of the folders that obviously held PPS bits and then relaunched DD from \Central in the hopes it would get re-installed.

Instead, I got a new dialog that read “Application cannot be started. Contact the application vendor”. The attached error details looked like this:

[11/27/2007 3:24:17 PM] System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException

- The directory name is invalid. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007010B)

- Source: System.Deployment

- Stack trace:

at System.Deployment.Application.NativeMethods.CorLaunchApplication(UInt32 hostType, String applicationFullName, Int32 manifestPathsCount, String[] manifestPaths, Int32 activationDataCount, String[] activationData, PROCESS_INFORMATION processInformation)

at System.Deployment.Application.ComponentStore.ActivateApplication(DefinitionAppId appId, Uri activationUri)

at System.Deployment.Application.SubscriptionStore.ActivateApplication(DefinitionAppId appId, Uri activationUri)

at System.Deployment.Application.ApplicationActivator.Activate(DefinitionAppId appId, AssemblyManifest appManifest, Uri activationUri)

at System.Deployment.Application.ApplicationActivator.PerformDeploymentActivation(Uri activationUri, Boolean isShortcut)

at System.Deployment.Application.ApplicationActivator.ActivateDeploymentWorker(Object state)

I returned to \Apps\2.0 folder to discover that the subfolders I had renamed were now completely gone. Not good! Next, I deleted the rest of the (about 19) folders which seem to be related to DD installation. I also removed the manifest files associated with each component from the \manifests folder. Still, no joy.

Finally I found that this registry entry held pointers to all the stuff I had just deleted:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Deployment\SideBySide\2.0\Components

So I dutifully killed each of the keys which matched a folder I had previously deleted. Still no love.

Long story short, I had to delete everything under the \Apps\2.0 Folder. This allowed me to reinstall DD at the cost of ALSO having to reinstall a few other ClickOnce apps I had previously run on my machine.

PerformancePoint Server 2007 Ships! (as in, you can download it)

russch — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:02:00 GMT

Last week I got all excited when I saw that PPS had launched - only to discover "launch" was really a marketing thing and there were no new bits to grab.

Well, last night PerformancePoint actually shipped - And I have some links for you:

To see all the stuff you can download:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/Browse.aspx?displaylang=en&productID=F52B1E9C-E169-4654-9A83-14A58A51C275

Eval x86:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6372C24F-67DD-42DD-B034-748907B23420&displaylang=en

Eval x64:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3ADAC793-DEF0-4BA8-A9AB-228979B8DB40&displaylang=en

Enterprise edition should be available on MSDN in early-mid October, and via volume licensing early November.

Dell and Microsoft engineer BI offering

russch — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:22:00 GMT

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 software many customers are using right now.

What is really cool about these offerings is they answer the oft-asked question: “what sort of hardware do I need for my DW/BI project?”: Three reference configurations have been created: one terabyte, two terabyte and four terabyte systems for data warehousing databases using SQL Server 2005. Dell and Microsoft worked together to execute various tests and analyze performance results of a sample business intelligence and data warehousing system under load. The testing was designed to validate the platforms for business intelligence and data warehousing, to provide the stability and performance of the hardware systems, and to define the reference configurations I mentioned earlier.

From what I understand, we’ll essentially be including all the goodness in the SQL 2005 BI stack + ProClarity. Now that PerformancePoint 2007 is upon us, the offering will be reconfigured to include PPS at some point in the near future.

More official details should be available at ~~www.dell.com/bi~~ http://www.dell.com/sqlbi a little later today. It doesn't seem like the site is up yet, however.

Update:

Here is a link to the actual 1/2/4 TB reference configuration to see how they did it:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/sitelets/solutions/software/db/microsoft_sql_2005_pr?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

...and another to an article on this event:

http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201808018

PPS CTP2 VPC now available, too!

russch — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:11:00 GMT

Last week I mentioned that PerformacePoint CTP2 was ready for download (http://blogs.msdn.com/bimusings/archive/2007/04/04/performancepoint-ctp2-now-available-for-download.aspx). Well, late last week the fine folks on the PPS team updated the site again, adding a VPC of CTP2 - It's a big DL, but well worth it.

PerformancePoint CTP2 now available for download

russch — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 02:22:00 GMT

CTP2 was just released, and can be downloaded at Microsoft Connect (https://connect.microsoft.com/default.aspx).

Browsing thru the content, I see 32 and 64-bit versions of the product, sample data, and even training material!