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On a fairly regular basis, customers I work with wonder out loud (read: gripe) why SSAS 2005 and 2008 don’t allow them to easily drill-down to the relational tables that back a cube using an action. SSAS 2000 did this nicely, but SQL Analysis Services 2005 and 2008 want to return rows from the cube vs. directly from the tables.

There is a sort-of-but-not-too-painful workaround available which encompasses using ROLAP partitions which point to the drill targets in question, but it’s still kind of inconvenience to deal with because you may end up setting up quite a few ROLAP partitions to support everything you need to do.

Brian Knight has come up with a really nice, clean solution which leverages a helper assembly to do the same thing. I like this approach much more because once you’ve installed the assembly, creating drill-through actions is quite easy. Thanks, Brian!

http://blogs.pragmaticworks.com/brian_knight/2009/09/creating-a-ssas-rowset-action.html

http://blogs.pragmaticworks.com/brian_knight/2009/09/calling-an-external-query-from-mdx.html

Vanity vs. Actionable Metrics

Russell — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:27:44 +0000

I’m not a big fan of this guy, but a recent guest post was a great read. The author, Eric Ries essentially argues that if metrics you’re tracking aren’t actionable, they’re “vanity metrics” and not that useful:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/05/19/vanity-metrics-vs-actionable-metrics/

When you hear companies doing PR about the billions of messages sent using their product, or the total GDP of their economy, think vanity metrics. But there are examples closer to home. Consider the most basic of all reports: the total number of “hits” to your website. Let’s say you have 10,000. Now what? Do you really know what actions you took in the past that drove those visitors to you, and do you really know which actions to take next? In most cases, I don’t think it’s very helpful.

Eric focuses on online / web analytics scenarios, but it’s easy to make the mental jump to more everyday BI applications and metrics like sales / calls handled / whatever. You should give this article a read.

Where did Project REAL go?

Russell — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:02:10 +0000

For the past several months, Project Real got lost out on microsoft.com – those who wanted the whitepapers and/or samples were pretty much on their own.

The materials have been restored and are now available at:

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/bi/ProjectREAL

In the “news to me” department, we’ll also see a 2008 version of Project Real at some point in the future – and no, I have NO idea when that will be

Troubleshooting issues with Excel Services Data Refresh

Russell — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:12:53 +0000

I don’t know what my mental block around Excel Services is all about – but configuring it just kills me.
After building more Hyper-V and VS images which include Excel Services than I care to count, I still have not managed to get data refresh working right the first time. Ever!

Kind souls often offer tidbits like “did you configure the trusted file location” and other nice-but-useless advice for anyone who has worked with the technology for a little while, and I just grind my teeth. Do I sound bitter? Well, I am. I get particularly aggravated that the error message doesn’t give me more information to go on, too.

Today, while building a new Business Intelligence demo image which relies completely on Windows 2008 & SQL Server 2008, I again ran into data refresh hell. But I also happened to stumble upon a great tool which helped solve my issues after only dropping 2-3 F-bombs.

For the MOSS gurus in the house, this is probably old stuff, but it was an epiphany for me.

The Log View feature integrates an easy way to your MOSS logs right into SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.

You can download it from here:

http://www.codeplex.com/features/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2502

Once you’ve grabbed it, drop it in the folder below on your MOSS box:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN

Then, navigate to the same location on a command prompt and execute the following:

stsadm -o addsolution -filename LogViewer.wsp
stsadm -o deploysolution -name LogViewer.wsp -allowgacdeployment -immediate
stsadm -o execadmsvcjobs
iisreset

That’s it. Jump to the Operations page of Central Admin, and you’ll see View Unified Logging Service under Utilities. Hit it.

Select a log file which covers the period you had a problem with data refresh, choose Excel Services in the This category filter, select Warning in Event Severity and click Go.

I found this:

Unable to establish connection using only the connection string. If a username and password are saved in the connection string, they may not be correct, or the Unattended Service Account may not be configured. [Session: 21.1wTVe6u1xgnzlBvXz6VtM90.5.en-US5.en-US73.+0300#0000-11-00-01T02:00:00:0000#+0000#0000-03-00-02T02:00:00:0000#-0060 User: ATLAS\Administrator

Whoops! Forgot to configure the Excel Services Unattended Execution Account. I knocked it out, bounced IIS, but still had a problem. So I went back to the log, filtered on Information in Event Severity, and found this:

The workbook 'http://atlasone/Reports/FirstTest.xlsx' attempted to access external data using the unsupported provider 'Provider=MSOLAP.4;Integrated Security=SSPI;Persist Security Info=True;Data Source=.;Initial Catalog=Adventure Works DW 2008'. [Session: 21.37RxBqgtK2fX8GRWS68rV90.5.en-US5.en-US73.+0300#0000-11-00-01T02:00:00:0000#+0000#0000-03-00-02T02:00:00:0000#-0060 User: ATLAS\Administrator]

Jeepers! The connection in my Excel worksheet was made with the latest/greatest SSAS provider, which didn’t even exist when MOSS was dropped – So I added MSOLAP.4 to the list of Trusted data providers (under Excel Services Settings in Shared Services), did another IISReset, and I was in business.

Can’t tell you how much time this little tool gave me back.

All Up BI VPC 7.1 Available for Public Download

Russell — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 12:46:24 +0000

Thanks to some of the fine product managers at Microsoft, the All Up Release 7.1 is now available for public download. It is made up of 7 RAR files, each about 700 MB:

This is really good stuff. Enjoy!

PerformancePoint Server Service Pack 2 Almost Here

Russell — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:31:55 +0000

The landing page for PerformancePoint SP2 just appeared at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/performancepoint/FX102380591033.aspx. While as of yet there are no download links on the page, I think it’s safe to guess that we’ll see the distro in the next day or so.

Happy patching!

SQL Server 2008 RTM’d yesteday. Now I gotta rebuild all my demos!

Russell — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:52:05 +0000

Sheesh, take a day off from reading mail and you miss the chance to blog about one of the most important products on the day it RTMs. I’m a day late and a dollar short, but SQL 2008 released yesterday. It is build 1600.22, and I see it is already out on MSDN. It also appears to be available on connect.microsoft.com for TAP customers.

My next project is to install on PPS on a Windows 2008 VPC runing SQL 2008 and see what happens. I know neither of those are supported yet, but it appears that I should be able to get it to work using a couple of tricks.

I’ll post more details later!