Because sometimes simplicity is best.
type *.csv >> data.txt - consolidate multiple files to a single file
copy a.csv + b.csv c.csv - consolidate multiple files to a single file
http://www.powerpivotpro.com/2012/09/combine-multiple-worksheetsworkbooks-into-a-single-powerpivot-table/Date formatting
curl http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mssmallbiz/archive/2013/06/28/almost-150-free-microsoft-ebooks-covering-windows-7-windows-8-office-2010-office-2013-office-365-office-web-apps-windows-server-2012-windows-phone-7-windows-phone-8-sql-server-2008-sql-server-2012-sharepoint-server-2010-s.aspx | grep -o -E "http://ligman.me/[0-9A-Za-z]+" | uniq | xargs -P 5 -n 1 wget --content-disposition
So what's it doing?First, download (or curl) the url specified. Second,search the second URL for a matching regular expression. Third, uniq(ue) the resultset. Fourth, xargs to deal with the large parameter list Fifth, wget to download the resulting URLs in a parallel fashion.
Why use both tools when they appear to do similar things?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/636339/what-is-better-curl-or-wget
If you're a Windows user, and can't install Cygwin, Powershell can do some of the things that wget can do.
http://superuser.com/questions/25538/what-is-the-windows-equivalent-of-wget
(new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('http://www.xyz.net/file.txt','C:\tmp\file.txt')
Here's a ton of GNU manuals, including wget.
Microsoft has released an Analysis Services 2012 and 2014 Performance Guide, 111 pages of multidimensional performance tuning goodness.
Is there a future for the multidimensional cube at Microsoft? Sounds like it may stick around for awhile longer.... watch for improvements in SQL vNext.
Performance is important, and not just for improving business processes. Licensing rules for SQL 2014 will probably cause server administrators to try and keep their server utilization at full capacity. Do more with less.
A similar whitepaper exists for PowerPivot and the tabular model in SQL 2012.
