Last week I was asked to tackle a requirement by a customer adopting Analysis Services to enable data exploration and ad hoc analysis by their users. One of their requirements was to secure columns based on a grant related to a cost center. For example, a grant has several attributes, with some attributes being considered “sensitive” and other attributes considered “non-sensitive”. Non-sensitive grant attributes would accessible to all users while a subset of the attributes in the grant table considered “sensitive” would be accessible to users related to the corresponding cost center. The challenge here is that while Analysis Services supports column level security, dynamic column level security is not supported. So my colleague and friend, the great Steve Pontello, and I put our heads together to address the requirement.
SQL Saturday #442 is upon us and yours truly will be presenting in Orlando, Florida on October 10th alongside Mitchell Pearson (b|t). The session is scheduled at 10:35 AM and will last until 11:35 AM. I’m very excited to be presenting at SQL Saturday Orlando this year as it’ll be my first presenting this session in person and my first time speaking at SQL Saturday Orlando! If you haven’t registered yet for this event, you need to do that. This event will be top notch! Continue reading Data Warehouse from the Ground Up at SQL Saturday Orlando, FL on Oct. 10th→
This week I’m teaching the Pragmatic Works Intro to MDX virtual training class. A student in the class asked how they could find the current day sales amount using MDX (no SSAS functionality) and I thought this was a worthy blog topic. This solution assumes that the cube is processed at least once a day as the query you’re about to see returns the last day in the cube that we data for.
Power Pivot is an amazing, flexible and powerful business intelligence tool (among other things) and there is no doubt about that fact. As a feature included with Excel 2013 and 2016 (and an add-on for Excel 2010), Power Pivot allows user with a little technical expertise to integrate disparate data source together within a flexible data model. Once the data is loaded into Power Pivot, we easily have the ability to create powerful calculated measures, key performance indicators Continue reading Taking #PowerPivot to the Next Level→
Thank you to everyone that registered and attended my webinar Designing your Data Warehouse from the Ground Up webinar this past Tuesday. And I’d also like to give a special thanks to my good friend, Mitchell Pearson (b|t), for helping me present this webinar. We had a great time!
Also, thank to everyone that tuned into the live broadcast of the webinar on Periscope! I hope you enjoyed the unique perspective Periscope gives.
In late June last month, the Microsoft Power BI team released the Microsoft Power BI Analysis Services Connector. The Power BI SSAS Connector allows your deployed Power BI reports to utilize your on-prem SSAS data sources. It’s super easy to set up and can be downloaded for free! And who doesn’t love “free”? Continue reading #PowerBI and #SSAS Tabular: A Natural Fit with the Power BI SSAS Connector→
I recently had a client give us a call asking for helping creating a calculation in her cube to show the month to date value for the previous year. Here’s the basics of the calculation I created.
As a Business Intelligence Consultant, I do a decent amount of speaking, interacting with the community, and have written and contributed on a few SQL Server books. A question I’m often asked is if I can recommend any good books which brings me to this blog post. I wanted to make you aware of four books for learning data warehousing and other MS BI technologies that I’ve found incredibly helpful over the years I’ve spent designing and implementing enterprise data warehouse and business intelligence solutions. Continue reading My Top Four Books for the MS Business Intelligence Professional→
After spending the last five years or so designing and performance tuning SSAS cubes and dimensions for the clients of Pragmatic Works, I’ve noticed there seems to be a recurring pattern with poorly designed dimensions. Because of this I wanted to take a few minutes to point out three easy things you can do to improve the performance and usability of your solution’s dimensions Continue reading 3 SSAS Dimension Design Best Practices to Live By→
