You heard it here first! (?)

 The next major release of the All-up Virtual Machine for Business Intelligence will be made available to Microsoft Partners in the near future (No, no word on whether the general public will be able to get their hands on it, and no exact date for partners, either – “soon”.)

 This particular platform is based on Windows 2008 R2 and the “November CTP” release wave of products: SQL Server 2008 R2, MOSS 2010, and Office 2010.  I’ve been playing with it for just under a couple of hours, and am quite impressed. It includes some interesting wrinkles like the use of sexed-up mapping (Silverlight + Bing for some really nice visualization) and PhotoSynth. It does an excellent job of showing off the new “social” features of MOSS 2010, as well as all the good self-service BI encapsulated in PowerPivot and Report Builder 3.0

 If you’re a partner, look sharp and download this sucker as soon as it’s available. You’ll need a large-ish machine to run the image on as it requires 6-8 GB of RAM and about 90 GB of HD space, but it’s worth it. I’m running it with 8 GB, 4 cores with the VHD file on a RAID 0 striped disk, and I’m really happy with performance after the initial warm up.

Noticed that Gartner’s MQ for Business Intelligence  is now out there for 2010:

http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/microsoft/vol10/article7/article7.html  

Compared to 2009, it appears that Microsoft (yay!), Oracle, and MicroStrategy moved up and to the right in the leader’s quadrant.

http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/sas/vol5/article8/article8.html

Of all the players in the MQ, it looks like Actuate is the big loser – it made a pretty big move down and to the left in the niche quadrant.

There are reports that the SSAS archive out on http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=868662dc-187a-4a85-b611-b7df7dc909fc is corrupt….”damaged, truncated, or has been changed”, to exact

To open it, simply rename the cube zip file to Contoso_Retail.zip and then try again – happy OLAP-ing.

For those of you who attended SQL PASS or other recent Microsoft-related technical conferences, you may have seen our new BI “Contoso” demo. Well, the data that powers it has now been made available for download. You’ll find both an OLTP DW and an OLAP cube for your data-munching pleasure.

 I haven’t had time to actually test-drive the dataset, but it is supposed to have millions of rows and be very real-world. Someone please download this thing and tell me how much data I have to look forward to playing with!??

Please?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=868662dc-187a-4a85-b611-b7df7dc909fc

Over on the Forrester Blog, Boris Evelson has written an interesting post about the real cost of creating a single BI report in the enterprise. He estimates a price tag of between $1,840 and $20K per report after one factors in expenditures on software, services, salaries, hardware etc.

He suggests four general approaches to lowering BI costs, and PowerPivot neatly enables at least two of the four strategies.

Is PowerPivot a BI panacea? Nah, of course not. But intelligently leveraged, I believe the tool will drive down costs associated with creating BI reports.

Over the week-end I was doing some analysis on SQL Server disk usage, and wanted to be able to display current disk usage by database. Up to this point, I’d mainly been doing a SUM over  my measures. Well, that would make no sense in this scenario – I’d end up with a meaningless number just like I would if I took a SUM of an Inventory value.

I found myself dealing with a classic semi-additive measure. These are easy to deal with using SQL Server Analysis Services, but a tiny bit trickier in PowerPivot.

I tried various DAX-related ideas, and some actually kind of worked, but Marius Dumitru, a co-worker at Microsoft, suggested the best solution.

I happen to have a date dimension which we could lean on for this challenge – I just needed to find the last “Disk Use” value that had been recorded. Since all of my readings are associated with a date, slam dunk!

Here’s what I did:

Created a calculated measure which SUMs the measure in my table (I named it “Sum Disk Size”):

     = SUM(‘Fact_DatabaseMetrics’[Disk Size])

Created a second calculated measure which filters the first, looking for the value related to the last associated date in my date dimension (via DAX’s LastNonBlank function) . I didn’t know you could filter a measure so easily!

        = ‘Fact_DatabaseMetrics’[Sum Disk Size](LastNonBlank(‘Dim_Date’[DatePK], ‘Fact_Database’[Sum Disk Size])

The second measure is what I added to my PivotTable.

Looks like May!

http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2010/01/19/sql-server-2008-r2-gets-an-official-date.aspx

Yes, it is totally possible to publish a SSRS report into your PowerPivot Gallery – In fact, the gallery invites you to do so with the “New Report Builder Report” item in the PowerPivot gallery’s silverlight application.

But as my buddy George Orwell might say, “All reports are equal, but some reports are more equal than others.”

Essentially, you’re not going to get a snapshot generated for your SSRS reports stored here.

The status message displayed can be somewhat confusing, too: “Snapshots were disabled to protect sensitive content” is dead on the money, but infers there might be a way to enable this sensitive content. Don’t waste your time looking for the magic property to enable dynamic SSRS snapshots, however. No such animal.

The “Snapshots were disabled” message is used in a number of situations where connections in a xlsx published to the gallery aren’t quite right, and I guess we chose to lump the SSRS scenario in with them.

If you’ve played with PowerPivot at all, it’s pretty obvious how flexible the tool is in terms of creating data models. After you initially create a model, you may want to spend some additional time with it to make sure users can easily leverage what you’ve created in other tools. If you don’t, the PowerPivot model you publish probably won’t see lots of re-use outside of the PowerPivot gallery and Excel because users won’t be able to get at the values they want to.

What am I talking about? Here’s an example:

I pointed PowerPivot at the Adventure Works DW sample database, and brought all its tables and rows into my workbook. I then published the workbook directly into a SharePoint 2010 PowerPivot Gallery. I didn’t bother to add any UI to the sheets in the workbook (no PivotTables, PivotCharts, Slicers).

Next, I launched Report Builder 3.0, created a new Analysis Services data source and typed in the location of the *.xlsx I published. I chose the single “sandbox” in the workbook as the database name. Here’s a screenshot of my new RB data source being created (embedded image truncated, click below to view complete screenshot) :

Then, add a DataSet to this Data Source and launch the Query Designer. Notice anything wrong with this picture?

That’s right — our dimensions are showing up as measure groups AND dimensions! And if you scroll down the dimension list, you’ll see that the the fact tables not only show up in the measure group list, but as dimensions, too!

Finally, crack open one of the measure groups – It contains NONE of the measures that are defined in the PowerPivot model – only  “_Count FactSalesQuota” in the screenshot below.

What the hell is going on? What you’re seeing is a function of how PowerPivot “thinks”. To PowerPivot, everything is a dimension unless proven otherwise, and therefore all of the facts in your measure groups are considered dimension attributes until PowerPivot understands that the attribute in question should really be considered a measure.

So let’s fix all this stuff up so we have a usable model, shall we?

To begin with, we’re going to need to help PowerPivot figure out which of our fields represent measures. In PowerPivot there are implicit and explicit measures. Any field you drag into the Values list of a PivotTable/Chart is regarded as an implicit measure by PowerPivot.

I’ve opened up that empty AWDW workbook again, and added a PivotTable.  Next, I’ll add the SalesAmountQuota measure from the FactSalesQuota table to the Values area of the Field List (embedded image truncated, click below to view complete screenshot).

After publishing the updated workbook to MOSS, let’s look at Report Builder again.

There you go – an implicit measure. By adding a field to the Values list of the Gemini Task pane, we’ve tipped PowerPivot off to the fact that SalesAmountQuota is indeed a fact.

However, if you look at the dimension list, you’re still going to see FactSalesQuota as a dimension, and SalesAmountQuota (along with 4-5 other fields) as a possible dimension attribute. Well, that ain’t right.

How to fix? Make that measure an explict measure. Here’s what to do.

Remove the SalesAmountQuota from the Values List in your PivotTable.

Switch back into the PowerPivot window, find the FactSalesQuota table, and select all the columns. Finally, right-click the selected columns and choose to Hide Columns | From Gemini and PivotTable

Back in the worksheet, click Refresh All on the Data ribbon, and your field list should look something like this (note how our measure group name is “dimmed”  – embedded image truncated, click below to view complete screenshot):

Right-click FactSalesQuota, and select Add New Measure. Create a formula which points to the SalesAmountQuota field you hid just a second ago (embedded image truncated, click below to view complete screenshot):

When you’re done, you should have something that looks like this (embedded image truncated, click below to view complete screenshot):

That’s just about it. Publish your workbook again, and fire up Report Builder. Note that the explicit measure you added now shows as part of the measure group FactSalesQuota and that FactSalesQuota doesn’t appear at all under dimensions.

And some notes:

In order to get the data model to refresh in Report Builder as I made changes in Excel and re-published, I found I had to sometimes delete the published workbook and/or IISReset. Using the Reconnect/Refresh button in Report Builder’s SSAS query designer didn’t refresh my schema for some reason.

Many thanks to Oliver Matrat, a senior PM on the Analysis Services team for helping me out when I was confused about how to make this stuff work – most of what I’ve related here comes directly from him.

File this under “duh”, but if your goal is to show PowerPivot charts to their best effect in the SharePoint PowerPivot Gallery, then….

Hide those chart data sheets, ladies!

Simple, but makes a world of difference in terms of how cool your reports look in the gallery and report carousel. Hiding the sheets which contain chart data get rid of tons of visual clutter and make your graphical reports more impactful.