All about using Microsoft products to deliver end to end BI

The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit.. Theory meets practice

I had been waiting for Amazon to send my copy of Joy Mundy's, Warren Thorntwaite and Ralph Kimball's new book and let me tell you after going through it for the past few days, I am extremely excited of the potential all customers that I work with will Read More...

Posted Saturday, March 25, 2006 2:04 PM by raheelr | 0 Comments

Mystery of the dissappearing roles in Analysis Services 2005..

One of the major differences in working with Analysis Services 2005 as compared to Analysis Services 2000 is that there is a specific developer environment to develop your cubes, data mining models etc and then there is a seperate interface for managing Read More...

Posted Saturday, March 25, 2006 1:54 PM by raheelr | 0 Comments

Excel 2007 and Analysis Services 2005

I just installed beta version of Excel 2007 and there is a lot of interesting integration with Analysis Services 2005. For a list of enhancements to Pivot Tables check out the Excel Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/category/11544.aspx . I will Read More...

Posted Saturday, March 25, 2006 1:50 PM by raheelr | 3 Comments

Reporting Services 2005 Report Packs are out..

If you have not worked with the Report Packs now is the time. These Report Packs provide you with out of the box Reports for your reporting needs such as reporting on Reporting Services logs itself, Integration Services as well as Exchange and other Microsoft Read More...

Posted Saturday, March 25, 2006 1:45 PM by raheelr | 1 Comments

Building Report Models on top of Analysis Services

There is a new capability within Reporting Services that allows ad-hoc reporting for end users directly. That tool is called Report Builder and can be invoked through the Report Manager web interface. In order to deliver this capability though to the Read More...

Posted Tuesday, January 03, 2006 8:47 AM by raheelr | 2 Comments

Managing Metadata : SQL Server 2005 Meta Data Samples Toolkit

Meta Data is an area where a lot of customers are looking for a solution. SQL Server 2005 components specifically Integration Services, Analysis Services and Report Model capabilities in Reporting Services provide a mechanism to bridge multiple backend Read More...

Posted Sunday, January 01, 2006 2:59 PM by raheelr | 0 Comments

Working on a project to deliver BI on Oracle sources

So I just came off a mini project working with a customer who is trying to solve a common problem. Integrating data across multiple sources for better insight to the business user. The difference: the customer prefers Oracle as their underlying database Read More...

Posted Sunday, January 01, 2006 2:53 PM by raheelr | 149 Comments

Starting something new

Hi there, Well, this is the place where I plan to share a lot of what I have learnt over the years helping customers with their data and intelligence challenges. I do work for Microsoft, so helping customers has always been in context of helping them Read More...

Posted Sunday, January 01, 2006 2:46 PM by raheelr | 3 Comments