Download details: Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Software Development Kit (SDK)

Hmm... I wonder if this relates to Microsoft Surface?  Multiple touchpoints  = multiple mice maybe? 

Overview

The Windows MultiPoint SDK helps developers create programs that affordably increase the reach of existing classroom computers. With MultiPoint, a single computer can have multiple mice connected. MultiPoint makes it possible for groups of students to work on one computer—at the same time—helping students everywhere to build essential learning skills such as collaboration, teamwork, and computer familiarity.

Source: Download details: Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Software Development Kit (SDK)

David Portas' Blog : SQL Server 2008

 

SQL Server 2008

Microsoft have officially announced their intention to have Katmai available in 2008. (The title of this post is nothing more than idle speculation. Katmai doesn't have an official name yet.)

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/may07/05-09KatmaiPR.mspx

Among the features announced are the Declarative Management Framework, the Resource Governor and also support for geographical data, documents and images in the database.

Declarative management will allow you to manage your SQL Server configuration across many databases and servers by defining policy rules that are automatically applied, montiored and enforced. It's a great feature for large data centres and complex environments. It's also unlike anything I have seen from the other DBMS vendors.

The Resource Governor is a very welcome and overdue improvement. It means that for the first time you will be able to allocate and limit SQL Server resources to support individual workloads with different priorities and needs running concurrently on the same server. That's going to help deliver more consistent performance and availability from every SQL Server instance - for example by making sure that ad-hoc decision support queries can't impact your operational systems by starving them of resources.

The new data type support is potentially exciting too. I've been asked more than a few times about support for spatial data within SQL Server. It's something that DB2 and Oracle already offer.

You can read more at:

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/futureversion/default.mspx

Source: David Portas' Blog : SQL Server 2008

David Francis Blog : PerformancePoint CTP3 - Possible release date and some future features in Monitoring and Analytics.

 

PerformancePoint CTP3 - Possible release date and some future features in Monitoring and Analytics.

I was asked last night whilst presenting Monitoring and Analytics in CTP2 to the UK SQL BI users group (www.sqlserverfaq.com) if I knew when CTP3 was due out.

This from Jeff Zhu at Microsoft on the newsgroup.

The date may be around July 20th.
Most of changes in CTP3 of Planning will be bug fixes. We also have some security enhancement in the application, more documentation, and a few of feature improvements. Don't expect many new features in CTP3.

Source: David Francis Blog : PerformancePoint CTP3 - Possible release date and some future features in Monitoring and Analytics.

OneNote Extensibility & More.. : Sort Pages powertoy

I like One Note... and people who put Power Toys out for it.

The ability to sort tabs is an obvious feature that was missing from 2003.  This powertoy solves the problem (for 2007)

Here's a comment from someone who is using One Note as a patient database.

Daniel,

This addon is SO highly coveted!  I fully plan on using OneNote for my clinical practice, however, I was really concerned about being able to find my patients quickly.  This will be just great (I can sort at the end of every day).

Suggestions?  Well, maybe an addon like this, but it will automatically take a page that begins with B and place it in the B section (or any other letter).  This will help me find my patient's names more quickly.

Thanks!

erik

Source: OneNote Extensibility & More.. : Sort Pages powertoy

Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog

I use OneNote regularly to track my day-to-day activities and various snippets from emails.  The WIN-S screenshot shortcut is invaluable when doing documentation.  I just installed 2007 and will have to see what new features come out of it.

I think there are some other people who have rave reviews of One Note, according to one of the founders of the product:

Another measure is "buzz" like the blog measure above. Are people talking about your product? If so, that's also a good sign. Notice there is a spike not just on the "news" of availability (around Jan 30) but there are higher spikes later - that's when people are using the product and talking about it. For examples of what people are saying, check out Dan's "blog roundup" posts: January, February, March, April. Some of my favorite quotes:

"OneNote 2007 sharing is indistinguishable from magic"

"I just purchased a copy of Microsoft OneNote, my life will never be the same."

But those are tame. Why not really go for it?

"The Greatest Invention in Human History?  I vote for Microsoft OneNote"

"I need Office OneNote 2007 to live."

And for the you-know-who crowd:

"I can't believe I'm so excited over some program that M$ came up with. It's probably just all the adrenaline that's been pumping through me lately."

And we're just getting started!

Source: Chris Pratley's OneNote Blog

 

I just wish that they would expose the .one file format and a macro language so that we can write some custom code against it.  (Silverlight viewer, maybe?)

Will see if it's doable 2007.

Dave Lloyd's 2 Cents

 

For example: 
=iif( me.Value < 0, “Red“, “Black“) placed in the color property of a textbox this expression will change the text colour based on the value returned.
=Format(Fields!BirthDate.Value, "MMM dd,yyyy") placed in the value property this expression will format a date value, (ie Dec 10, 2006)=System.Web.HttpContext.GetGlobalResourceObject("AppResources", "ID14831").ToString() placed in the value property uses your existing resource file to translate a label

Source: Dave Lloyd's 2 Cents

Requirements for a Local Cube in Analysis Services 2005 and Excel 2003

Analysis Services really shines as a client-server solution.  However, for remote locations, portability, and custom applications, local cubes may be what you want. 

Creating a local cube is fairly simple so I won't go into it.

The syntax can be found here.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms145581.aspx

After playing a bit with the parameters, I managed to create a global cube located in a .cub file on my laptop.  Oddly enough, Excel 2003 does not associate .cub files, so you need to either associate it or open Excel and then open the .cub file.  Opening the file brings up the standard pivot table interface against the local cube.  A couple problems I encountered - dragging in dimension attributes appeared slower than hosting the cube on a server, and I encountered the 64,000 row limit pretty quickly.

I passed the cube on to someone else in our company, who received a No Visible Tables error message.

Nobody said client requirements for BI solutions were trivial.

Here they are.

Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0856EACB-4362-4B0D-8EDD-AAB15C5E04F5&displaylang=en

MSXLM 6.0 Parser

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=46&p=1&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=993C0BCF-3BCF-4009-BE21-27E85E1857B1&u=http%3a%2f%2fdownload.microsoft.com%2fdownload%2f2%2fe%2f0%2f2e01308a-e17f-4bf9-bf48-161356cf9c81%2fmsxml6.msi

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 PivotTable Services

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2BB62F35-D041-42AC-98DA-6EC97168BE21&displaylang=en

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Provider Services 9.0 OLEDB Provider

http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/4/D/44DBDE61-B385-4FC2-A67D-48053B8F9FAD/SQLServer2005_ASOLEDB9.msi

Of course, Analysis Services 2005 also has support for synchronizing databases, so if it is possible to keep multiple servers at remote locations, this would probably be the better route for things like SOX compliance and security purposes.

Creating a Heatmap in Reporting Services

 Ever since I found WinDirStat, the best tool for finding large files on your hard disk and cleaning up data, Treemaps and Heatmaps have been of interest.

Here is one way to replicate this functionality in Reporting Services.

I generated the colors by finding the darkest acceptable color (not quite red) that black text was still readable on top of, then creating a gradient using Paint.NET fading from this color to white, then finally using a "pixelate" effect in Paint.NET to remove the gradient smoothness and get definite colors. I'm sure you can think of better ways to do this!

Source: Thomas Williams :

TagJag! : Home

Searches feeds for keywords and generates a live OPML file. 

TagJag!

Source: TagJag! : Home

BI Blogs

 

Our Blogosphere
• Cindi Howson's BI Scorecard
• The Brain Food Blogger
• Tony Byrne's CMS TrendWatch
• Third Eye View, by Rajan Chandras
• Breakthrough Analysis by Seth Grimes
• In Context by Doug Henschen
• As the Enterprise Develops, by Nelson King
• David Linthicum on Changing the Enterprise
• Alan Pelz-Sharpe's ECM TrendWatch
• Addicted to BI, by Neil Raden
• Peak Performance by Mark Smith
• Product Maven
• Bruce Silver's BPMS Watch
• David Stodder's Mission Intelligence

Source: http://www.intelligententerprise.com/movabletype/blog/chowson.html

Home :: Revelation Technologies

 

Dali is the intelligent object-relational mapper and data access layer that can drastically reduce the amount of database code you write. Most developers experience a 50-80% reduction in data access code. Less code means less errors and less time.

Source: Home :: Revelation Technologies

:: BIScorecard® ::

 

Spreadsheet Evaluation
This evaluation discusses criteria to consider when evaluating BI suites Office add-ins and export capabilities.

The BI Market
Business intelligence and the sub markets defined. Lists vendor products per sub market, serving as a necessary guide for comparing like-for-like products and seeing the breadth of individual vendor offerings.

Blank BIScorecard^®
This spreadsheet provides a summary overview of vendor scores per major functional area plus a detailed list of 100+ criteria to consider when selecting or standardizing on a BI product.

Flying High with BI
How innovation and a maturing market will finally allow BI to take off in many organizations.
Enterprise Business Intelligence: Strategies and Technologies for Deploying BI on an Enterprise Scale
Here's the Deal: Negotiating BI contracts
The BIScorecard^® review series in Intelligent Enterprise
Although the product scores here are now out of date, the series provides you with a framework for evaluating BI suites and a sample of the approach used on BIScorecard^® for current versions of BI suites.

Source: :: BIScorecard® ::

Certified Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP): TDWI

 

Certified Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP)

TDWI, the leading association for business intelligence and data warehousing professionals, offers the industry's most comprehensive certification program available: the Certified Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP). CBIP, a true test-based certification program, is offered in five key specialties for Business Intelligence success: Leadership & Management, Business Analytics, Data Analysis & Design, Data Integration, and Administration & Technology.

Becoming certified requires that you pass three exams; the Core exam, the Data Warehousing exam, and one specialty exam. Passing the CBIP exams is based on your knowledge and experience within your area of specialization. Prior study is not required although it is recommended to update or expand your current knowledge.

Levels of Certification

Practitioner Level: CBIP certification at the Practitioner Level is awarded to professionals who score above 50 percent on each of three exams. Practitioner Level certification demonstrates a working knowledge of concepts, skills, and techniques within a specialty, as well as the ability to assume leadership responsibilities in the area of specialization at the project level.

Mastery Level: CBIP certification at the Mastery Level is awarded to professionals who score above 70 percent on each of three exams. Mastery Level certification demonstrates that concepts, skills, and best practices have been mastered within a specialty, as well as the ability to lead a team effectively at the project and program levels, and the skills to mentor others.

Source: Certified Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP): TDWI

On BI Bake Offs and Vaporware | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog

Predictive Analytics - Something worth looking at (see Monte Carlo Analysis) 

During this last course, attendees also threw the vendors a wild card in which they got to vote for a new demo topic. The vendors only learned what that topic would be during the lunch break. Top of the list: predictive analytics (beating out other hot topics such as performance management, production reporting, and BI search). Kudos to each of the vendors for speaking about - and for some, demoing - these capabilities literally at the last minute!

Source: On BI Bake Offs and Vaporware | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog

Questions and Answers about Using Local Cubes to Improve Browsing Speed Performance

 

How can I create local cube files?
There are two ways to create local cube files in Analysis Services 2005. The easier way is to use a command called CREATE GLOBAL CUBE. A more complex (and more flexible) way is to use Analysis Services Scripting Language (ASSL). CubeSlice 9 supports two forms of ASSL – one that uses the Analysis Server cube as the data source and the other that uses the relational data source. The CubeSlice Relational ASSL usually offers more flexibility in creating local cube files.
For more information on the creation of local cube files, download the document Using Local Cubes with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services from this website.

Source: Questions and Answers about Using Local Cubes to Improve Browsing Speed Performance

Classics Week: Chocolate Covered SQL - Worse Than Failure

 

Toby Gray, that's just not fair! How come my chocolate covered raisins never come with any SQL?

Source: Classics Week: Chocolate Covered SQL - Worse Than Failure

Daily Dose of Excel » Automation

 

Nat asks:

How do I refer to a table on the web? How to I refer to specific colums/row/cells in a web table?

Here's an example that may help you out. It goes to Yahoo's finance page (where I knew there would be a table) and finds the table with the mortgage rate. Then it finds the row for 15 year mortgages and writes the whole row to an Excel sheet. MSDN has help for these HTML objects here. Look for 'document', 'table', and 'td'.

Source: Daily Dose of Excel » Automation

Wiley::MCTS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Implementation and Maintenance Study Guide: Exam 70-431

 

Implementation and Maintenance exam (70-431) is the first stop for everyone entering this new certification track, and serves as both a single exam certification as well as the entry exam for the MCITP-level certifications. This book provides an introduction to the development and administrative aspects of SQL Server 2005 and features practical guidance for all aspects of the exam.

Source: Wiley::MCTS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Implementation and Maintenance Study Guide: Exam 70-431

Download details: Microsoft SharedView Beta

 

Microsoft SharedView Beta

Brief Description

Microsoft SharedView is a fast and easy way to share documents and screen views with small groups of friends or coworkers; anytime, anywhere. Use SharedView to put your heads together and collaborate.

Source: Download details: Microsoft SharedView Beta

Download details: Teradata-Microsoft White Paper - AJI and OLAP.doc

 

Whitepaper - Improve your OLAP Environment with Microsoft and Teradata

Brief Description

This paper describes how you can leverage Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and Teradata technologies to improve your analytical OLAP application environment, specifically relational (ROLAP) type solution.

Source: Download details: Teradata-Microsoft White Paper - AJI and OLAP.doc

Download details: Centralizing and Sharing Business Intelligence

 

Brief Description

myBI enables users to view reports, scorecards, key performance indicators (KPIs), multi-dimensional analytics, and other metrics without having to move from one reporting site to another.

Source: Download details: Centralizing and Sharing Business Intelligence

Bill the Billionaire Buys Avenue for $6 bills.

 

..today, Microsoft announced the purchase of aQuantive, a 10-year-old, publicly traded digital marketing company in an all cash deal worth approximately $6 billion -- the biggest acquisition in Microsoft history.

So who is aQuantive? The Seattle-based company owns Avenue A | Razorfish, Atlas and DRIVEpm, which Microsoft calls "one of the industry’s most successful families of digital marketing service and technology companies." The company was originally founded in 1997 as Avenue A, and went public in 2000 under that name. It became aQuantive in 2003.

Source: Microsoft Gets Its Ad Network#comments#comments

KartOO visual meta search engine

 

Great site for finding patterns, related sites and referrers to a web site. 

Link to KartOO visual meta search engine

Elizabeth Vitt - Analysis Services - Importing Perfmon Data into Profiler

 

One of the greatest enhancements in Analysis Services 2005 is the ability to use SQL Server Profiler to troubleshoot performance issues during querying and processing. Even cooler is the ability to import Perfmon data into Profiler so you can analyze system and Analysis Services performance counters at every step of querying and processing.

Source: Elizabeth Vitt - Analysis Services - Importing Perfmon Data into Profiler

Automating Analysis Services Deployment

 

Automating build of Analysis Services Projects

As you may be aware, an Analysis Services project consists of the following files:

• A project file (*.dwProj)
• One or more  Data sources (*.ds)
• One or more Data source views (*.dsv)
• A database file (*.database)
• One or more cube files (*.cube) with their partition (*.partitions)
• One or more dimension files (*.dim)

You can right click the project in Visual Studio and choose "build". What happens now seems to be a lot of called to DLL files executed by the integration between Visual Studio and the Analysis Services. The output of this build is the bin folder in your project directory. This folder contains a database file (*.asdatabase). The .asdatabase file is the one you want - you will see why later.

Unlike other projects - which you can build using their proper compiler (Example: CSC.EXE, VBC.EXE) - Analysis Services does not seem to have a compiler executable.

You could be tempted to run msbuild. Unlike most temptation this will result in disappointment - msbuild does not understand Analysis Services files.

The only way I have found to automate the building of Analysis Services projects is to invoke Visual Studio from the command line. Say you have a project called: MyAsProject.dwProj. To build it and obtain the asdatabase file you execute the following:

devenv MyAsProject.dwProj /rebuild Relase /project MyAsProject

So far so good - now you have automated the createion of the .asdatabase file.

You are not done yet. The asdatabase file provides the input to the Analysis Services Deployment Wizard. The spell cast by this wizard allows you to transform an asdatabase filen into an XML/A file. This XML/A file can be run on your deployment target - which will create the cube database.

From the command line the Deployment Wizard can be run in two modes.

The answer mode:

Microsoft.AnalysisServices.Deployment.exe /a

In this mode, you get to choose all the server specific settings and write them back to your bin directory. Check out the BOL documentation to find out exactly how this is implemented (You will find no defense for the naming of the executable in the documentation)

Once you have your answers stored (which you will only do once) you want to automate the creation of the XML/A file. Execute:

Microsoft.AnalysisServices.Deployment.exe MyAsProject.asdatabase /d /o:MyProject.xmla

Voila! You have your xmla file, which you can copy to your deployment target and run. By the way. xmla files can be run from the command line using ascmd.exe which you can find here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms365187....

Source: Thomas Kejsers Blog

Many to Many Dimensions

 

Many-to-many dimensional modeling

Source: Forum

Microsoft SQL Server 2005, 2000 and 7.0 Builds

 

What version of SQL Server do I have?

This unofficial build chart lists all of the known KB articles, hotfixes and other builds of MS SQL Server 2005, 2000 and 7.0 that have been released.

Source: Microsoft SQL Server 2005, 2000 and 7.0 Builds

How to Get Reporting Services & Vista to Play together...

 

After several weeks of frustration I finally got Report Manager to work with Vista.  I guess it was too much to expect of Microsoft to actually have their own software install correctly on their own OS.  For anyone else having problems this is what I had to do:

1)  In Configure Report Server|Web Service Idenity - add both Server & Manager to the Classic .Net AppPool.

2)  Even though I am the only user account on the computer I'm developing on and log in as administrator, that, apparently isn't good enough for Vista.   (Apparently in the world of Vista NOONE is an adminstrator with full rights - great big atta boy to MS).  I had to go to the control panel and add my user account and the admin account (for good measure) to the IIS user grooup.

3) Go to add/remove programs and install EVERY IIS option; again, Microsoft won't do it for you.

4) Turn off that silly user control dohicki that Apple makes fun of in their commercials (Earth to Microsoft - that thingie IS rather stupid; how about finding a way to stop hackers without crippling your OS?)

End result: I can now use Report Manager on Vista Ultimate 64bit/SQL Svr 64bit with only a few minor glitches thanks to some clues I picked up in this forum and some hair pulling sluthing.

Source: SSRS and Vista - MSDN Forums

Greg Galloway is Testing cube performance improvements

 

Conclusions

• It is clear that ProcessAdd is worth the extra effort if you need to further optimize ProcessUpdate dimension processing.
• It is clear that AttributeHierarchyOrdered=false on high cardinality attributes makes a significant difference to dimension processing. Test case H shows that AttributeHierarchyOrdered=false on high cardinality attributes can double performance of ProcessAdd.
• ProcessUpdate is by far the most expensive option available. It is so much more expensive than ProcessFull that you should definitely verify whether processing scheme #1 actually performs slower than processing scheme #2 on your dataset.

Source: Greg Galloway

Windows driver examples

No more copying large ISO files around? 

HttpDisk is a virtual disk driver for Windows that uses HTTP to mount disk or CD images from a web server.
Latest news: Support for persistent connections to improve performance.

Source: Windows driver examples

Plus, a virtual disk drive file, basically TrueCrypt without the encryption.  Useful for maintaining drive letters between systems, and possibly as a siloed work area for source control systems.

FileDisk is a virtual disk driver for Windows NT/2000/XP that uses one or more files to emulate physical disks. A console application is included that let you dynamically mount and unmount files. An example of use for this driver is if you have made plans spending the weekend writing an RAID driver for NT but find you are short of disks. FileDisk can also use CD-images.

Info about SSAS - Home

 

This website is designed for the developers and administrators who work with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 (SSAS). Here you will be able to find latest news, MDX FAQs, OLAP design FAQs, links to articles, BI blogs, webcasts, forums, job postings, products and any other information that is related to SSAS. As the registered user you can submit your own links or articles. They will appear on our site after website administrators approval (usually the same day). We also encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter that will keep you informed about latest additions to our website.

Source: Info about SSAS - Home