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The custom MDS workflows, AKA External Action Business Rules or custom MDS assemblies, are one of the more advanced features of MDS. They allow you to extend the standard MDS business rules by getting MDS to fire Entity Member member data at an external...
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Sometimes when using SSRS to create documents such as invoices, it is necessary to include columns in a table which may or may not be shown. Often with these documents layout is very important, and having a table changing width as columns are shown...
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GeoFlow was released to public preview yesterday; a new 3D visualization tool for Excel which allow users to create, navigate and interact with time-sensitive data applied to a digital map. Back in October last year, along with 25,000 other people, my...
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Many of you will be aware of the Kimball concept of conformed dimensions. This is the principle of joining multiple fact tables, often from multiple source systems, into the same dimension table. Using this shared dimension the many fact tables...
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This post is to share some of my findings about the different ways of dealing with Type 2 changes in SSIS environment. I wanted to provide comparison of the methods in terms of performance, reusability and ease of maintenance. For the purposes of the...
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Although it’s arguably not the most popular in the Kimball series, The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit contains a huge amount of vital information that’s focussed on the ETL side of data warehousing. In particular I’ve found the data quality screens design...
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I’ve spent quite a long time recently developing SSRS reports for Dynamics AX 2012. In a change from AX 2009, the newer version now uses SSRS as it’s main reporting engine. No doubt this is so that business with existing experience in the...
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A client recently asked for an invoice document to be designed using SSRS. The layout was pretty standard but for one important caveat: The payment details section had to be in a fixed position at the bottom of the last page of the report...
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I’ve been doing quite a few demos and Proof of Concept (POC) projects recently for MDS. Understandably there are always a raft of questions that come up during demos and POCs, one of which recently was “how do I ensure that this attribute’s value is unique...
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Having just returned from SQL PASS I thought I would blog a few highlights about the conference and some of the things I came across and am looking forward to. I went over to Seattle with two of my colleagues and we started with a little sight-seeing...
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I’ve given quite a few MDS demos recently and one question I seem to get asked often is “What features does MDS 2012 have compared to MDS 2008R2?”. As its happened quite a few times, I thought it would be a good idea to put a quick post together to explain...
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This one’s a short blog post, and by no means new, but it may help you in the future and maybe save some head scratching. Commonly in Data Warehousing projects you will be processing data through tables whilst staging and cleaning source data. These tables...
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RANKX was a new function made available in DAX at the launch of SQL Server 2012; however Ranking is a widely used function in most BI projects, and was very much anticipated. Having worked extensively with Tabular on a recent project we had the need to...
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If you have an MDM requirement to consolidate multiple sources of Master Data together into a single golden record, then you have a few different ways to achieve this on the Microsoft platform. This blog post gives an overview of the different ways that...
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A few people have asked me about this recently, so I thought I’d share my approach. Creating demo environments, particularly for the MS BI Stack, can be time consuming and a challenge, particularly when you need to take the demo with you and can’t rely...