Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Last comments on the PPS Planning news
By now just about everybody who has anything to say about the killing-off of PPS Planning has blogged, so I thought I’d post up some links. The judgement seems to be that it’s hardly a surprise that it wasn’t successful and that even if they could have got the tech side of the product right, they didn’t have the means to sell it; on the other hand, the news that the surviving parts of PPS will be effectively free for Sharepoint customers is certainly going to be a positive move for its uptake – although it can also be seen as another blow for another set of partners, those who provide web-based SSAS client tools.
Anyhow, the links -
Nigel Pendse: http://www.olapreport.com/Comment_Bizdemise.htm
Johan Pellicaan: http://officeapplications.typepad.com/bridge/2009/01/microsoft-business-intelligence-changed-strategy-unclear.html
Mauro Cardarelli: http://blogs.officezealot.com/mauro/archive/2009/01/25/21394.aspx
The Panorama blog: http://www.panorama.com/blog/?p=129
Cindi Howson: http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2009/01/microsofts_big_1.html
The official word from the Microsoft BI Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/bi/archive/2009/01/23/microsoft-bi-strategy-update.aspx
Cubegeek: http://cobb.typepad.com/cubegeek/2009/01/microsoft-pps-dead.html
Last of all, Andrew Wiles makes a very sensible suggestion here:
http://andrewwiles.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!43141EE7B38A8A7A!451.entry
Given that several partners and customers who were Planning early adopters have been pretty much [expletive deleted] by this move, why shouldn’t Microsoft open source it and make the code available somewhere like Codeplex? It would be a nice gesture.
SQLBits III Summary
Phew, another SQLBits done and dusted. And I think it was a good one, especially looking at the comments so far:
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/drjohn/archive/2008/09/14/busting-for-a-wii-at-sql-bits.aspx
http://andrewwiles.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!43141EE7B38A8A7A!368.entry
http://blogs.technet.com/andrew/archive/2008/09/14/sql-bits-cubed-thanks.aspx
Thanks to everyone that came and especially to everyone that helped out! And if you weren’t there, the best thing is that Microsoft brought along a camera crew and filmed the sessions (I think all of them, certainly all of the sessions in the room I was monitor for) which should be made available online somewhere soon. Apologies to everyone who stopped me to say hello – I was running around like the proverbial blue-a*sed fly all day so I couldn’t stop to chat with anyone for more than a few minutes, I hope I didn’t seem too rude…
Code sample to create Analysis Services partitions in SSIS
Courtesy of Jamie Thomson, here’s some sample code showing how to create Analysis Services partitions from within an Integration Services package using AMO:
Although I should stress that if you’re using this in production, you do want to set the slice property on a partition to ensure you get the best possible performance in all cases.
Post-Holiday Roundup
Ahh, so I’m back from my holiday and feeling much better -even if it did manage to rain every single day while I was away (that’s the risk you take with holidays in England). Now all I have to do is get through the massive pile of emails waiting for me and steel myself in preparation for the next few months of hard work… roll on Xmas! Anyway, a few interesting things that happened/thoughts that occurred to me while I was away…
Of course the big thing that happened, the day after I left, was the RTM of SQL2008. Hopefully you’ve heard this news by now, but the big questions here are: is AS2008 any good? Do I want to migrate, and if so, when? Personally, I’ve been using it for a few months now on a project and my impressions of it are positive. As I’ve said before there aren’t any really amazing wow features that will make you want to upgrade, but the performance improvements can in some cases be quite significant, the new BIDS is easier to use, and there are a few obscure fixes/changes in behaviour which tie up some loose ends left over from AS2005. Since migration is very, very easy indeed I would encourage you to install it on a test machine if you haven’t already and start thinking about moving up. Of course the mantra of ‘wait until SP1′ is so deeply ingrained in people’s minds that most people will want to do exactly that – and there’s a lot of sense to that approach, since the first bugs are being found already (see here) but equally there are a fair few known problems with AS2005 SP2 and given the problems that all of the CU releases have (see here for example, and I’ve heard the same story for every single CU, they create as many new bugs as they fix) I wouldn’t recommend them; I suppose you could wait for 2005 SP3 but my feeling is that AS2008 is the better bet.
Meanwhile, in the cloud I see that Good Data have gone into beta, and there’s a new, mysterious MDX-queryable (Mondrian-based?) offering that has broken cover called BI Cloud. If I have time, I’ll try to check them out. Also on the net http://www.learnmicrosoftbi.com/ seems to have a lot of good videos explaining the basics of AS. And there’s a new podcast featuring Richard Tkachuk from the SQLCat team where he talks about the performance improvements in AS2008 and seems to suggest that it’s now possible to use hints in MDX with a new function whose name I couldn’t make out – I’ll post if I get more details.
I’ve also been thinking some more about the DATAllegro deal. There seems to be some discussion about when something that works with SQL2008 can be released, and the folks at DATAllegro are keen to stress that their architecture allows them to plug in new RDBMSs easily so the implication is that it will be sooner rather than later; clearly the investigation work has been going on for a while, and must somehow tie in with the MatrixDB stuff that got leaked a few months ago. All of this would be good for AS running in ROLAP/HOLAP mode on a MPP SQL Server, but can this technology but I wonder whether it could be made to work with AS in MOLAP mode? I think it could – surely the hooks are already there with the remote partitions/linked measure groups/dimensions stuff. Just conjecture though; I think we’ll find out more around the time of PASS and the BI Conference.
Lastly, I’ve booked my place for Mosha’s MDX Deep Dive pre-conf seminar at PASS this year. Who else is going?
Policy-based management almost makes it to AS2008
I was using SQLMS with AS2008 the other day and noticed when right-clicking on the server node in the Object Explorer window some policy-based management options seemed to be available:
Now policy-based management is one of the new features of the relational engine in SQL2008; you can read more about it here:
http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1492
For a moment I was excited, then I took a look at what facets were actually available for Analysis Services: there’s only one, and that gives you the same options to set as you got in the old Surface Area Configuration tool. Maybe in a future release we’ll get some more functionality – it would be great to be able to enforce policies like "Always associate a partition with an aggregation design" and so on.
BI Evening July 17th
There’s going to be another one of the UK SQL Server Community’s BI Evening events happening at Microsoft UK’s offices at TVP in Reading on the evening of July 17th. It’s been far too long since the last one, I know – we’ve all been a bit distracted by SQLBits (and there’s going to be another one of those on September 13th – do you or our company want to sponsor it?).
You can sign up here:
http://www.sqlserverfaq.com/
Here’s what we’ve got lined up:
"PEL vs MDX – what are the differences between the two languages?"
Jeremy Kashel, Adatis
Jeremy Kashel from Adatis presents an introduction to the PerformancePoint Expression Language (PEL). The content will be geared towards MS BI developers, and will highlight the differences between PEL and MDX, with the aim that those with MDX experience will be able to make a fast start with PEL
"Using Excel Services with Analysis Services and MOSS"
Jeremy Kirkup, TAH
If you are just starting to explore delivering BI solutions with Excel Services and Sharepoint then there are some issues that it is wise to be aware of in advance. This session will describe some real world lessons gained while creating BI solutions which expose Analysis Services data through the Excel Web Access web part.
The Excel 2007 client has first class support for the some of the advanced features of Analysis services such as drill-through. However, when exposing pivot tables to a browser through the Excel Web Access web part this feature is not available. The session will discuss a couple of approaches to implementing drill-through functionality for EWA based pivot tables using the MOSS SmartPart, AJAX and the Excel Web Services.
Google Powerapps
While Jamie (who I saw through a window today, although I didn’t manage to say hello) is wondering about whether SQL Server Data Services will ever include a cloud-based OLAP engine, Panorama have just announced their own equivalent called Panorama PowerApps:
http://www.panorama.com/blog/?p=111
http://panorama.com/powerapps/
And guess what, it’s queryable through MDX! That means that not only will you be able to query it through Google Apps but also Excel. I’ve signed up to be a beta tester, so I’ll blog more when I have a chance to check it out.
Distinct Count White Paper
Yet another excellent paper on optimising distinct count measures from the SQLCat team:
http://sqlcat.com/whitepapers/archive/2008/04/17/analysis-services-distinct-count-optimization.aspx
Actually I’m beginning to wonder whether I should be linking to the SQLCat team site – in the same way I never link to Mosha because I assume that everyone who reads my blog reads his too, then I would hope everyone subscribes to the SQLCat team blog as well.
One topic missing is a comparison of the performance of distinct count measures with the technique of using many-to-many dimensions to get the same result that Marco Russo describes in his famous m2m white paper:
http://www.sqlbi.eu/Projects/Manytomanydimensionalmodeling/tabid/80/language/en-US/Default.aspx
Marco presented on this at PASS Europe and mentioned (which tallies with my experience) that this approach can perform as well as, and sometimes better than, a distinct count measure.
illuminate, FAST and yet more completely unfounded (and probably ill-informed) speculation on my part
I was just reading this article on TWDI:
http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=8876
It’s on illuminate and their ‘correlation DBMS’ – not relational, not OLAP, not COP, but a ‘value-based’ system. All very fascinating indeed, although their web site is yet another one of those irritating ones that leaves you with the feeling that some important technical detail and information on where they’re positioning themselves is missing. This entry on their blog:
http://www.ianalyze.net/2008/02/which-tool-do-i-use.html
is a case in point – what is it exactly that illuminate can do that these other platforms can’t? I guess it’s the kind of query that they talk about here:
http://www.ianalyze.net/2008/03/incremental-approach.html
…which is certainly not the kind of thing that OLAP is good at, or even meant to be good at.
I might have completely the wrong end of the stick, but didn’t Microsoft get its hands on something similar when it acquired FAST last year (blogged here)? Is this it:
http://www.fastsearch.com/FAST_Database_Offloading_Solution_Product_Sheet_SJgpx.pdf.file
? I’m sure I remember reading about how FAST could speed up DW-style queries by loading all the data into an index; I’d be interested to hear from anyone who can set me straight on this. If I’m right, then perhaps some of the comments I made when talking about COP databases last year about how they would fit into the Microsoft BI stack would also be relevant here.
BI Competency Centre Survey
BARC, the publishers of the BI Survey, have asked me to publicise a new survey they’re doing on BI Competency Centres:
http://bi-institut.de/web/orga_of_BI/
It should only take a few minutes to complete, and they donate €1 to charity for each participant.
