Enterprise is the Cadillac Tesla Model S of SQL Server editions – unbridled access to all the things YAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHhRR! Other SQL Server editions (e.g. Standard, Business Intelligence, Developer, etc) have limitations – on product features (e.g. no Columnstore Indexing) and/or hardware resources (e.g. can’t use more than 16 cores or 4 sockets…whichever is smaller) and/or […]
Quick note to the regular reader: don’t worry, still planning on finishing the series on Building a Scale-Out OLAP Farm in the Cloud with Azure VMs. But I’m afraid there’s not much time to work on that until we ship some important code (which I’ve been working around the clock on for 2 months). And so […]
This past weekend, I passed the 70-462 exam which completes the requirements for achieving the MCSE Business Intelligence certification. This exam had been lingering for quite some time and I continued to put it off because, to be completely honest, I just don’t find the material as interesting and would prefer spending my free time digging deeper into […]
Earlier this month, I passed the following two exams putting me 1 away (70-462) from the MCSE Business Intelligence certification. 70-466 – Implementing Data Models and Reports with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 70-467 – Designing Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Below is an outline of the material I worked through in preparation for these […]
Lately, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time troubleshooting some performance issues related to PowerView reports running against a SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 Tabular data source. One of the first steps in the troubleshooting process involved turning up a SQL Profiler trace on the SSAS Tabular instance and having the users reproduce the […]
During the last half of 2012, I had the opportunity to demo a few of the Microsoft self-service BI tools to a number of audiences. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we weren’t able to cover PowerPivot in as much depth as it deserves. But, because of it’s sheer awesomeness and importance in the Microsoft BI […]
Before my last project, SQL Server Service Broker was simply a topic I’d read about a few times and played with on a lab system once or twice. I understood the use cases at a high level (scaled-out service-oriented systems) and was quite impressed with a few of the published articles and case studies (like myspace)…but […]
User adoption is critical to the overall success of any IT project…but that goes double for self-service BI projects because at the end of the project the users will be expected to actually use the tools to generate their own BI (reports, dashboards, scorecards, analysis) and facilitate fact-based decision making in a rapidly evolving business […]
Yesterday morning, I passed the 70-463: Implementing Data Warehouses with Microsoft SQL Server 2012! This completes the second step on my SQL Server 2012 certification path. What follows is a quick outline of the materials I used while preparing for this exam along with some comments and afterthoughts. Data Warehouse Design Read The Data Warehouse […]
Over the past few months I’ve delivered a few presentations for current clients (and potential leads) covering the “Sharepoint BI Portal”. The presentation is very demo-heavy and focuses on the self-service capabilities of the Micrsoft 2012 BI stack when integrated with Sharepoint 2010 and built upon a well constructed BI Semantic Model (BISM). This morning […]
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