August 2007 - Posts
For those of you who, like us, took the plunge and went for running a 64-bit PerformancePoint program, the wait is now over and CTP4 is now available on the connect site.
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Performancepoint
Chris Webb has already mentioned this but looks like registration for the next UK SQL BI user group evening is now open (Look for events on the right).
Edenbrook's Mark Hill (SQL 2008) and IMG's Suranjan Som (Data mining) are presenting.
If that's not enough to get you there then free beer and pizza should do the trick :)
From Ben Tamblyn - The CTP4 for PerformancePoint is now on the connect site. Couple of things to note from the read-mes and doco:
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This is just the 32-bit release - 64-bit will be out next week due to a performance issue being resolved.
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If you're still on CTP1 or CTP2 you'll need to uninstall before you install CTP4. You can upgrade from CTP3 but make sure backup anything important
Lots of new functionality in both Planning and Monitoring. Some key ones:
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Sorting in Analytic Charts and Grids
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Formatting on charts and grids
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Lots of new chart types
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Export dashboards to Powerpoint (Not sure if this will be live data like you can do in Proclarity)
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PAS integration
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Planning server performance improvements
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migration between environments
This is the last CTP release before product launch next month. The US launch looks like it will be a big do, with lots of super-excitement! So what's in store for us?
Technorati Tags: MDX, Analysis Services, Sql Server
Whilst not changing nappies and singing lullabies, Sacha is developing a .Net mdx helper class that behaves very much like an ADOMD command and runs an mdx query that returns a data table. "Why not just use ADOMD?" I hear you ask - as Sacha mentions there are a number of reasons such as the fact that the data types are not returned (needed by .Net controls like Chartfx) and top level hierarchies ("All Time" etc ) are not always returned dependant on your query layout. And in fact Sacha's little helper (ho ho ho) does use ADOMD but rather than use the returned table it parses the XML file that is generated. This XML is actually quite simple once you get your head around the layout and is in fact very rich containing all sorts of metadata that is not returned in by ADOMD
Other nice functionality includes the ability to return a number of cube and database properties (Description etc, last update, last processed);
But the functionality I really like is that the class uses a stored query definition which can contain parameters much like a SQL stored procedure. Sach and I have had a number of conversations over the past few days about why there is no concept of this in AS2005 (or 2008?) and haven't come up with a valid reason. Surely people out there want to be able to re-use the same mdx queries (with different parameters). How cool would it be to be able to use "exec mdxsp_GetResults(Param1, Param2)" in various mdx editors. At current the query defs are stored in text files but we're looking at alternatives such as using msdb or the even the xmla cube def itself.
In fact I'm surprised that no-one has done this already - or have they?? Very interested to know if people think this is something worthwhile?
NB - if you found this blog looking for the excellent AS Stored procedures project it's here