The title says it all!

x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=90c596a5-aca4-4ded-9072-facf834bc0c6&displaylang=en

x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3ad75ae5-d2cd-4953-87cf-5f74d79804c6&displaylang=en

docs: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc514367.aspx

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

I’m giggling like a little girl because today (well, last night) CTP2 (also known as the “August CTP”) hits the streets.

I jumped out to MSDN and TechNet and see subscribers will be able to download it today – I’m actually looking at the bits out on TechNet right now.  A general release will be available two very long days from now, on Wednesday the 12th.  You can go for here for more information. The download link is here.

So what’s in CTP2? That’s sort of a good news / bad news proposition, actually.  As you know, R2 is hitting on the self-service BI theme with all cylinders. The main focus of this effort will be Project Gemini, but don’t forget about SQL Reporting Services which has much new coolness, too.

Project Gemini

I’m sure you all know about Project Gemini, and if you don’t, you should read about it here. Gemini is part of the next wave of innovation represented in the R2 / MOSS 2010 and Office 2010 releases. It is generally discussed in relation to the SQL 2008 R2 release. However, the CTP2 release of SQL doesn’t actually include the Gemini add-in for Excel 2010 – and most folks don’t have access to Excel 2010 yet, anyway.

The next community tech preview, CTP3 will contain Gemini bits. And, no, I don’t know when it will be released. I’m also unclear if this will be a public CTP or if you have to be invited.  In any case, if you want to sign up for notifications about CTP3, go here:   https://profile.microsoft.com/RegSysProfileCenter/wizard.aspx?wizid=27d33a54-f9f5-4357-b652-6f03ba8a4d23&lcid=1033.

For those of you lucky enough to be part of the Office 2010 Tech Preview, you can get your hands on a CTP2 synced version of the add-in right now. More information. You’ll see links at the very bottom of  the page that allow you to register and then download.

SQL Reporting Services

In terms of SSRS, you’re going to be able to play with Report Builder 3.0. It includes the new mapping functionality, which is still a work in progress in CTP2. It’s quite cool, however.

For all you recovering Microsoft Access junkies: Remember the love-hate relationship you had with DLoopkup? The function everyone maligns and then uses anyway? Well, SSRS has got it! Ours will be called Lookup(), and I won’t spoil the fun…check out Lookupset() and MultiLookup(), too.

Some really compelling functionality isn’t in the CTP yet, and I’m not sure whether the SSRS team has talked about it yet, so I’m not going to name/whine about its absence and inadvertently let the cat out of the bag.  Additional good stuff is coming, though!

Books Online

Don’t forget to RTFM! Download it here.

ProClarity users tend to miss the ability to create calculated measures when they first start experimenting with Excel-as-ProClarity-replacement. Fear no more!

Tyler Chessman, another Microsoft Technical Specialist has created an add-in to allow you to do just that in 2007.  It’s called PTPower, and you can check it out here!

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.

Most people have discovered by now that in order to use Windows 2008 as a “client” in BI demonstrations that you need to install the “Desktop Experience” feature of the OS. Without it, you’ll have problems getting into SharePoint from Office.

During a recent POC,  I was working with an “all 2008 image” (SQL 2008/Windows 2008/MOSS SP1/PPS SP1/Office 2007), and had a bear of a time getting Excel to browse MOSS libraries. Desktop Experience was installed, but when I attempted to browse to a MOSS library in Excel, the Web Query dialog would pop instead:

If I just plugged the URL of a report or document library into the Open: dialog, Excel was actually importing the page as HTML!

Office 2007 leverages WebDav in order to open MOSS libraries as folders, so I figured that was the problem – I found I was unable to Map a Network Drive to any of the MOSS libraries so I knew I was on the right track.

After several un-install / re-installs of the Desktop Experience component with no change in behavior,  I went ahead and  installed the IIS 7.0 WebDav Extension: It adds some additional configuration UI to InetMgr, and I thought having access to those extra knobs and dials might solve my problem. No joy.

Long story short, I took off my geek hat, put on my consumer hat and got the help of Rakki from PSS. After noticing that I had the IIS 7.0 WebDav Extension installed, he mentioned that MOSS uses its own implementation of WebDav and we didn’t need the extension. He suggested we remove it. I frankly didn’t think it would make a difference since I had the problem before I had installed it and putting the component on the box was an attempt to solve the issue to begin with, but whatever.

So, we un-installed it, and lo and behold, I was able to map drives to my MOSS libraries and Excel / Office was able to browse them. Why? We’re not sure – perhaps the un-install of IIS WebDav did something to nudge the “broken” MOSS WebDav implementation back to life. Complete speculation on my part.

But, if you run into the same issue, maybe this will save you some time (or maybe not, who knows).

I’m currently working on a project which leverages many PerformancePoint reports. The dashboards I’ve built use a fair number of analytic chart report objects on a single dashboard page  (at least 4, sometimes more).  When I ran many of these pages, Internet Explorer 7 generally pegged my CPU at 97%, and it was taking at least a minute for the page to render. Often, more than half of the report objects failed to render at all (“an unexpected error occured”).

I’m working in a single integrated environment (IE/SQL/SSRS/SSAS/PPS/MOSS all on one box), and I could tell that IE hogging up CPU wasn’t even allowing SSAS, SSRS, PPS and MOSS to do their work. While IE was sitting @ 97%, msmdsrv.exe or reportingservicesservice.exe might hit 2% CPU for a moment then drop back down to %0 when they usually used more CPU cycles.

Clueless and confused, I appealed to those smarter than I for help. Josh Unger, a PPS SDET at Microsoft suggested I try IE 8 on the image. I dutifully installed it, and whammo, problem solved.  My slowly running dashboards now rendered in no more than 15 seconds (and these were pages which included PAS and SSRS reports – the analytic charts returned within moments when they had been the problem children earlier).

I circled back and asked Josh exactly why life was so good in IE8, and he explained that IE 7 ( adhering to standards) only allows two concurrent connections, and therefore 2 AJAX requests made to the server at the same time. Perhaps that didn’t do a lot of good when I had 4, 6, 8, or more  AJAX controls on a page all wanting to do stuff? In IE 8, we can have up to 6 connections. 

I guess in my case getting more reports “working” on the server at the same time allowed them to begin returning more quickly. And once a report had returned, I suspect that the particular AJAX-based control that hosted it didn’t need any/as much CPU vs. having it sit there waiting for a connection to become available.

Thanks to Josh and thanks to IE8!

If you’ve been waiting for the Click Once version of Report Builder 2.0, your wait is over (as long as you don’t mind using non-RTM bits).

The SP1 CTP will allow you to launch RB 1.0 or 2.0 as Click Once applications in both Native and MOSS integrated mode.

Have at it!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6f26fc45-f0ca-49cf-a6ee-840c7e8bb8af&displaylang=en

Oh, and how to do you turn it on? In native mode, go to Site Settings,  then set Custom Report Builder launch URL to /ReportBuilder/ReportBuilder_2_0_0_0.application. MOSS integrated mode has a similar property which can be found in the Set Server Defaults link of the Reporting Services section of the Application Management inside the SPS Central Administration console.

Carl Rabeler of the Microsoft SQLCat team has just released a really nice set of tools targeted at helping you analyze SSAS performance.

You can read about it here:

http://sqlcat.com/toolbox/archive/2009/02/05/a-solution-for-collecting-analysis-services-performance-data-from-many-sources-for-performance-analysis.aspx

Then download it from codeplex, here:

 http://www.codeplex.com/SQLSrvAnalysisSrvcs

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