Vidas Matelis Analysis Services Blog

Microsoft BI Conference 2008 will start in just 11 days, and today I finally finished building my session list. This was really hard to do, and in most of the time slots I still have 2-3 sessions that I would like to attend. Last year Microsoft recorded Breakout sessions, so if they will do the same this year, I’ll try to attend more Chalk Talk sessions and will view sessions that I missed from a recorded DVD.

After last years BI conference I complained about a lack of technical content. But this years session list looks exceptionally good. There are plenty of sessions on SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, Performance Point, Excel Services and Master Data Management. Marco Russo already blogged about the expected announcement during this BI conference regarding “Self-service BI”. I am very interested to hear what Microsoft will say about this. I’ll blog about my conference experience as soon as I’ll come back.

By the way, does anyone want to join us for a beer after the Sunday Evening Welcome Reception? We started to talk about this in this forum post and if you have no other plans then let’s meet.

In one of my previous blog posts I described SQL Server 2008 Management Data Warehouse (MDW) and how it can be used to collect performance information. This post will describe how you can create new MDW data collection sets to capture SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) 2008 performance counters.

SQL Server 2008 does not have a graphical interface to create MDW data collection sets, so the best way to do that is by scripting an existing system data collection set and then changing it. To script an existing data collector, start SQL Server Management Studio, expand “Management”->”Data Collection”->”System Data Collection Sets” folder then right mouse click-> “Script Data Collection As..”->”Create To”->”New Query Editor Window”. For my starting point I scripted the data collection set “Server Activity” and got this script.

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If you are like me and prefer a visual learning approach, then you should check out the website http://www.learnmicrosoftbi.com. The website owner Craig Utley has recorded a list of videos that are a good way of learning about Microsoft BI technologies and specifically Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 and 2008. At the time of writing this post there were 14 videos ranging from 6min to 57min each.

His latest video “SSAS 109 – Attribute Relationships” should be watched by all SSAS developers who want to understand why attribute relationships are so important. This video shows plenty of examples and compares SSAS 2005 and 2008 versions. This is one of the best tutorials on this subject and I highly recommend it.

The best part – all of the videos are high quality and free, all you need to do is register and start downloading.

As you probably all already know Microsoft released SQL Server 2008 Release Candidate 0 (RC0).  You can download RC0 from here. You can also download SQL Server 2008 Books Online Release Candidate (RC0) and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack RC0, June 2008.

Just today Microsoft also released another related download: Sample Databases for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 RC0. New sample set contains 8 BI related files that lets you install Adventure Works DW and Analysis Services databases:

• SQL2008.AdventureWorks_DW_BI_v2005.ia64.msi
• SQL2008.AdventureWorks_DW_BI_v2005.x64.msi
• SQL2008.AdventureWorks_DW_BI_v2005.x86.msi
• SQL2008.AdventureWorks_DW_BI_v2005.zip
• SQL2008.AdventureWorks_DW_BI_v2008.ia64.msi
• SQL2008.AdventureWorks_DW_BI_v2008.x64.msi
• SQL2008.AdventureWorks_DW_BI_v2008.x86.msi
• SQL2008.AdventureWorks_DW_BI_v2008.zip

As you can see, installation files are split by CPU type (x86, x64 and ia64) and also by related SQL Server version. Files with _v2008 suffix can only be used with SQL Server 2008 and demonstrates some of the new features. If you want to do manual file copy, you can use 2005 or 2008 version zip file.

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In my previous post Katmai Analysis Services 2008 November CTP5 – tests on metadata rowsets I listed examples of new SSAS DMVs. But there were few DMVs that you could not query. For example if you would try to execute following query:

SELECT * FROM $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_PARTITION_DIMENSION_STAT

You would get this error message: 

The ‘DATABASE_NAME’ restriction is required but is missing from the request.

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Our company is using Microsoft Excel 2007 with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Excel Services as the primary interface to access Analysis Services cube data. This works very well on Windows XP PC, but was almost unusable on Windows Vista PC. On Vista PC you would get just too many “Enter UserName/Password” dialogs.

Here is what would happen on Vista PC when you try to open Excel report with Pivot Table from the SharePoint: Read the rest of this entry »

I just came back from 2008 MVP summit. I had a great time, especially meeting so many new people.

Here are few pictures from this summit.

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A few weeks ago I asked a question on Analysis Services 2008 forum if there will be PowerShell support for SSAS 2008. I got an answer from Microsoft, that no native support is planned. I know that Darren Gosbell released PowerShell Provider for SSAS 2005, but for the different reasons I cannot use it with all clients. But just this week Carl Rabeler (Microsoft) posted a new updated set of Analysis Services 2005/2008 Samples. One folder in these samples contained 4 PowerShell script examples that shows how to use it with Analysis Services. I tested these samples and they worked on a standard SSAS 2008 installation. Today Carl Rabeler actually updated these samples – fixed some minor issues and added one more sample – to get a size of Analysis Services database.

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