Tag: SSAS

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Business Intelligence

Day 3 and Overall Impressions #sqlpass #summit12

To conclude my posts on the PASS Summit this year (see day 1 review and day 2 review), I want to go over the last day and then talk a little about the entire conference and my takeaways.

On Friday I attended three sessions. The last two of the day, the second to last one I was on the phone and missed the beginning and then decided to check out all the other things before they were done, and the last session slot, there wasn’t much appealing, and most everyone already left, so I skipped it.

1. CLD-303-A SQLCAT: What are The Largest Azure Projects in the World?

This was given by Kevin Cox and a another SQLCAT member. The SQLCAT team is crazy smart. If you can talk to any of them, you need to. Any chance you get. This was a good view of customers they have dealt with that are pushing SQL Azure to the limits. Since we are running a project now that we are going to be pushing SQL Azure (and Azure) hard, I thought this was good.

So customers have 20TB dbs, 10k databases, so it for sure can scale. Also some good tips/tricks on what you can do to use SQL Azure to the max like the other customers

2. BIA-203: Real-Time Data Warehouse and Reporting Solutions

I wasn’t sure on this one. Carlos Bossy gave a couple of presentations, and he seemed to know what he was presenting, but a topic like this is so situational it is tough to make it generic. Also, there isn’t a “huge” need for real time and I think I wouldn’t implement it the way he was saying anyways. Run SSIS 24/7 with a for loop that never ends? That is crazy. I’d rather pump data through something like StreamInsight with some code than that SSIS solution. Or run things every couple of minutes or something. “near real time”. Also his solutions was using replication which is fragile.

3. BIA-402-M: Optimizing Your BI Semantic Model for Performance and Scale.

Probably one of the better sessions. Again, Microsoft guys letting it all out here. Akshai Mirchandani and Allan Folting from Microsoft. Basically going *in depth* on how PowerPivot and Tabular does what it does with columnar compression, etc. Where you can look and dig under the hood to find ways to make small changes and optimize processing or querying depending on your need. This is a session I want my entire BI team to watch together.

Overall Takeaways Technically:

Azure, Hadoop, Tabular, Power View, BI, DAX, Excel. You can see a pattern here. I am sure there were good “DBA” and DB Dev sessions but I didn’t go to any. BI is taking shape with Microsoft’s strategy and it is all tabular/excel azure/hadoop stuff. Exciting times.

Overall Thoughts of This Year’s Summit and SQL PASS

Guidebook – was ok. I thought it could have been better. I have used before at conferences. Why no native Windows Phone app?

New Layout – the last two years I was at the summit, things were laid out (as far as where things were) pretty much the same. This year it was changed up. Took a day to get the “lay of the land”

Keynotes – kind of the same as usual. I mentioned in by part 2 blog about how the blogger/twitter table needs to grow up, just want to say that again here. First day there was some drama, second day more drama and badmouthing/infighting. Just needs to stop. Leave the drama at home.

Seattle – Seattle is great. Not going to Seattle next year since the summit is in Charlotte, is going to be tough. I know where to go in Seattle and I like the area. I am worried out Charlotte.

Reg Dates – as I mentioned in my day 1 review, many people came out a day early since the dates said 6th-9th. Same thing next year. Should really say 7th-9th.

Hash Tags – on twitter, usually the hash tag is #sqlpass .. this year they said use #summit12 , some people were using #summit2012 and confused. Also, using #summit12 wasn’t looked at by as many people which stinks as I used that on all my tweets. Next year they need to just keep it as one hash tag.

Karaoke – I have been to the unsanctioned one. It was great. Not sure sanctioning karaoke like this year makes sense. It loses some of what made it cool to begin with. I could get into a lot of detail here but I hope people understand what I mean… taking something “underground” and trying to make it mainstream, usually doesn’t work as well.

#sqlfamily – this is something that I have many thoughts on. I will say things but I don’t think many want to hear it. “sqlfamily” isn’t as big of a family as those in the echo chamber think it is. I would say 99% come to the summit and have no real idea of what it even means. 1% that tweet, present, schmooze think everyone else feels and interacts the same way they do, and it just isn’t true. I met many people at breakfast/lunch and after hours that in fact have no real want/need to be totally ingrained with the clique. Many don’t even use twitter, etc. They are just going to work, doing their job, trying to learn. etc. I think it would make sense fo the sql/sql pass community to step back and think about that for a while.

This year I wrote a blog post for the SQL Server Blog before the summit to drive excitement, which was cool. The first day at the keynote a guy sat next to me and we were talking before it started. He was like “dude, I read your blog on the sql server blog!” – To me that was so cool. He said I was a “rockstar”. No, I am not a rockstar (or an MVP – but the blog says I am, maybe the emails have been going to my spam folder all these years) – I am just a regular tech guy that is passionate about technology, SQL, BI (and a ton more). I was really happy though to see that people are reading that content and it is firing them up, it is what my intention was. And if you read that post, I took back a ton of good stuff from the summit. I am already starting to formalize and get strategy/implementation plans going for things I directly learned.

So to close, my third summit was great. Great content, meeting new people and seeing old faces and having lively discussions and knowledge sharing during the day and over a beer. I am going to miss Seattle next year but I can’t wait for the next summit, and possibly even the new SQL BA (Business Analytics) conference in April 2013. I hope everyone who went to the Summit this year enjoyed it and learned as much as I did!

Categories
Business Intelligence

Day 1 Review #sqlpass #summit12

This SQL PASS Summit was my third, and it was good. Kind of crazy timing as we just had a baby 2+ weeks ago, so I am very lucky I got to go.

Day one was Wednesday Nov 7th. There is a kickoff thing the night before which is always good to see everyone again, etc. There are pre-cons two days before (5th, 6th). Myself, as with many I talked to, came out the 5th, thinking the conference started the 6th, which we were mistaken, so it was kind of a free day, but still things going on. The website said 6th-9th so we all assumed without digging into the detail. At least I wasn’t the only one.

The first day keynote was good, Ted Kummert from Microsoft which I have seen a few times now, and the same cast of characters, Amir Netz showing off more Power View and Movie data. The big things announced that made me perk up were SQL Server 2012 SP1 and Power View over OLAP (coming soon?). No big flashy giveaways like BUILD, but good keynote, then the fun starts.

I attended 4 sessions on Wednesday

1. BIA-303: What’s New in Analysis Services 2012? – Chris Webb

This was my first session of the day, and it was in 305-TCC. TCC was across the street, which maybe was like that years past, but I never had to go to any, so everyone seemed lost. We finally got there, but then Chris Webb told us that the abstract was wrong in some places and the talk would mostly be about tabular, not multidimensional. Oh well, good stuff anyways. There was one slide about OLAP stuff. The biggest thing I got out of this was xEvents for SSAS, and how to pull into PowerPivot. This is the first time I have seen Chris Webb present and it was good.

2. BIA-316-M: Enterprise Information Management: Bringing Together SSIS, DQS, and MDS

For the second session, it was two Microsoft employees. I like to try to hit many sessions by Microsoft Employees because well, they usually have worked on the products, and they get into details, and they sometimes let some juicy details slip.

Matt Masson and Matthew Roche are great presenters, funny and play off each other. They showed and telled SQL Server 2012 MDS and DQS and discussed how it could and should be used in orgs. Master Data is a huge issue in many businesses and the Microsoft solution looks really good. Using DQS along with SSIS to clean your data, or as a very smart “spell checker”, and then MDS to track changes, workflow, and send back data to source systems if you’d like. The big thing here I took out was how they see MDS fitting into businesses, and that a BI team should implement MDS/DQS to make sure their dimensional data is clean and the “golden master” they need for great BI reporting, and updating back to source systems is a secondary thing.

3. BID-212-S: Around the World with SharePoint BI Toolbelt

This was a typical Brian Knight session. Not as huge of a production as some of them I have seen. Just him and his employee/bi architect and a helper/demo person.

They showed quickly how to get SharePoint setup for Excel Services and Power View and then did some demos. Overall good stuff but seemed a bit rushed and some things didn’t work. They demo’d PerformancePoint, which who knows what future that has, but seems like the best tool for OLAP scorecards in SharePoint. Performance Point has been an enigma for us to do anything with, not sure we ever will. I always see it demo’d and see the benefits, and see what it can do, but we never get around to doing it. Maybe someday, or maybe it will just get replaced by something..

As I said he brings up a sales person from his team or someone new to show how easy it is for a non-techie to use Power View (or whatever tool they present) and go through a little demo.

4. BID-102: Mobile Business Intelligence for Everyone, Now!

Final presentation of the day was with Jen Stirrup, who also won the PASSion award on Thursday. I also chatted with her briefly Wednesday morning, which was good as I haven’t met her before this summit. The presentation was OK. It was a 100 level, but I wanted to see some Mobile BI. I have some high expectations as I saw Jen Underwood present on Mobile BI at TechEd, so was expecting more of the same. Jen Underwood was actually in the audience and answered some audience questions.

The presentation had some technical glitches, and also dug a little to deep into visualization discussion, which is good, but I wasn’t expecting it in this one, maybe a different session. Jen showed some stuff on her iPad, and talked about how she uses Azure and SSRS in Azure, and also HostedPowerPivot, which was good stuff, but nothing new that I didn’t see at TechEd.

I use MobiSSRS for SSRS reports on iOS and that works great, she didn’t mention it, but Mobile BI presentations can get into the “3rd party app here and there” instead of what you can do out of the box. With mobile BI though, the first question is, “do you run SharePoint?” and the second is, “It is Enterprise?” because that makes a big difference in what you might try to do

Wednesday was a good day, I didn’t do much in the evening besides just grab a bite to eat and hit the hay. Bummer this year was that I started getting a cold on the way out on the plane, and it ate at my voice all week. Nothing to serious but enough to not want to talk in a pub about BI much as you have to yell.

More to come about Day 2 and Day 3, and overall thoughts..

Categories
Business Intelligence SQLServerPedia Syndication

Selling Management on SQL 2012

2012 is going to be a big year in the SQL world. No, the world isn’t going to end. SQL 2012 should get released by Microsoft, hopefully in the first half (cross your fingers for the first quarter!) of the year. Great! But many out there are now on SQL 2005, or 2008, or 2008 R2, some even on SQL 2000 (SP4 – still get support?) but you want to get to SQL 2012. What can you do to make that transition easier? You need to sell the features and benefits, just like anything else.

Clustering

If you have any kind of clustering environment, or mirroring, or are even thinking about doing clustering, then SQL 2012 is going to be what you want to do. With AlwaysOn, it makes it dead simple to create and manage clusters. If you look back over the versions of SQL, and think clustering, you might shutter. With 2012, things become much easier and management has to see this benefit, as with anything, to make your systems more available with the new AlwaysOn

Master Data Services and Data Quality Services

Microsoft came out with their first round of Master Data Services (MDS) in SQL 2008 R2, but it was lackluster. The interface is clunky, weird, and hard to use. Most “end users” of MDS aren’t going to be that technical. You need something simple, like SharePoint, or Excel. MDS is neither (even though its a weird version of SharePoint). With 2012, MDS is vastly improved and actually something viable where an Enterprise could use it for a Master Data Management (MDM) solution. Couple that with Data Quality Services (DQS) and you get tons of bang for your buck. with MDS and the excel add on, this will be just what the doctor ordered for MDM groups in businesses.

Business Intelligence

Near and dear to my heart of course, is Business Intelligence. What a huge release for BI folks in 2012. First off, a whole new analysis services type, Tabular. Columnar Vertipaq type cubes. Reverse engineer PowerPivots right into SSAS Tabular and then tweak to release out to the Enterprise.

Then the enhanced SSIS stuff, better IDE, better management of packages, and more. Of course the integration with the Visual Studio 2010 IDE is a welcome feature, especially for those of us that also need to work on C# and .NET 4.0 stuff!

But don’t forget the potential biggest thing yet out of the BI tools for 2012 – Power View (yes the space is intentional, not sure why.. but now we have PowerPoint, PowerPivot and Power View). Naming aside, Power View could be a HUGE analytics tool to get more BI out to the people in an Enterprise. First off, they plan on making it work on iOS! Power View works on tabular cubes, so you see the tie in there. The one big thing with Power View, is it just works inside of SharePoint. No stand alone editor. You better have SharePoint 2010 and a pretty good SharePoint admin along side your BI team to get all this stuff working. Some of the enhanced end user alerting in SSRS integrated mode looks nice as well. But once again, you need SharePoint! DON’T for get the SharePoint!

There is much more in SQL 2012 that will make DBA’s lives easier, and BI pros development streamlined. Too much to outline in just one post. But if you are trying to sell SQL 2012 upgrade to management, the “big three” things I outlined above are a good starting point. One thing to be aware of though is that the licensing model has changed in SQL 2012 to core based, so you would want to read up on that.

I’m excited for SQL 2012 bits to hit and I hope you are too!

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Business Intelligence

#sqlpass 2011 Summit Thoughts

Want to get a quick post out before I forget everything cool I have been thinking about the 2011 SQL Pass Summit in Seattle WA.

The conference started out great with a first timer reception (this was my second year), and I knew a few first timers so that would great.

The first day keynote was good, and then the sessions I hit were on a full range of things, new semantic search stuff with file table, and more.

I missed a couple of sessions on day 1 because I was in a Microsoft led focus group on “BI in the cloud” some very cool ideas thrown out and excited to see what is coming up in the future.

More good keynote on day two, a deeper dive into the stuff in SQL Server 2012 (formerly Denali). Went to some good sessions on Data Quality Services (DQS) and Vertipaq vs OLAP, and Power View (remember the space!) SharePoint and Power View integration, etc. Some very cool stuff coming soon with the 2012 release.

Tabular cubes vs Multidimensional cubes. OLAP vs Vertipaq, etc. Big debates and questions here, when to put things in Tabular vs MDX, etc. DAX solves some hard problems we run into with MDX.

Another thing I went to a couple sessions on was StreamInsight. This is some very cool technology for complex event processing, using .NET and LINQ. The StreamInsight guys are crazy smart. Also integrating StreamInsight with Azure, and doing some crazy processing and analysis of tons of data in near real time. I see this technology making a difference somewhere down the road.

Power View was another big winner from the summit. This integrates with SharePoint 2010 as a Silverlight (SL still isn’t dead?) report builder and viewer. Not even sure they are called “reports” anymore, but “views”. You create views and you can interact/edit them in real time. Export to PowerPoint too. These views work off “tabular” vertipaq BISM (BI semantic model) cubes. This technology is going to change how we deliver information to the business.

Being able to take a PowerPivot (no space!) and reverse engineer it into SQL Server Data Tools (formerly BIDS – in VS2010 shell) to create a BISM tabular cube and publish to SSAS Tabular instance looks great. Solving problems like crazy snapshotting and many to many and time analysis using DAX looks very useful.

Of course, GameWorks appreciation night was fun, and I found a Mcmenamins (Six Arms) up the road from the convention center, so I got get a taste of Ruby again. Good conversation and times at the Taphouse and around the Sheraton and Convention center was good too. Seattle is a nice city and the weather was pretty good I thought. Another great summit.

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Work

Looking to Hire…

I have been managing two different groups @ Trek -  (Business Intelligence and .NET Software Development) for a while now, and we have some openings we are trying to file, so that is why I am putting this out here.

First role, looking to hire a Microsoft .NET Windows Forms developer, or someone with web experience looking to get into Windows Forms and eventually WPF/Silverlight, and also Windows Services. C# is the language.

Second role, looking for a Microsoft Business Intelligence Developer/DBA – SSAS/SSIS/SSRS, DBA experience preferred. Working on cubes, and ETL’s and reports and DBA stuff.

Shoot me an email at steve_novoselac@trekbikes.com with your resume and info.

Categories
Business Intelligence SQLServerPedia Syndication

Where does PowerPivot Fit?

Now that SQL Server 2008 R2 is out, and Excel 2010 is out. You can get PowerPivot (http://powerpivot.com/) and create your own in memory cubes!

…. Or something like that.

I still haven’t figure out where PowerPivot fits in a business scenario. Why?

Well first you have what are now being called the “old school” BI users, that use Excel to connect to an SSAS cube and create fancy pivots and reports, maybe convert to formulas and create some nice reports/dashboards.. analytics.

Then you have people who only consume canned/standardized reports, through SSRS mostly, or maybe Excel Web Services… but they don’t create. Just consume.

You might even have power users, who take Report Builder and create those SSRS reports for other users. Awesome.

But then, you have this tool, PowerPivot. What can you do? Hit databases (mostly… cubes and other sources as well), bring back data, relate it, and create pivot reports/graphs off of it.

But you better be pretty dang advanced as a business user to use PowerPivot. I could count on one hand the users (that I have dealt with over the last 10 years) I would feel comfortable giving it to and not ending up with more of a headache.

What do I think is still missing from the Microsoft BI toolset? Looking at Business Objects, the Web Intelligence. Universes. You create a Universe off of a datasource and expose it out to the user, they can create reports/ad-hoc whatever off of it.

Kind of like the ever elusive “Report Model” in the Microsoft stack that no one ever uses, ever will use, or has no reason to use. But in BO, they make it useful.

I don’t see PowerPivot taking the place of a Report Model/Universe, so where does it fit? IT Analysts making “pre” cubes before you actually make cubes for your users that just want to hit it with Excel and not care about anything else?

Or people who just want to create their own cubes in silos. Tell me how that lends itself to “one version of the truth”?

Either way, we will see how it evolves and hopefully find some good use for it. 🙂

Categories
Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

Dev and Prod Systems, Using a HOST file to ensure your datasource is pointing the right system

In many shops, I am guessing there are multiple servers. Development, Production, maybe a Staging, etc.

With SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), you set up data sources, connection to databases. In SSAS you usually have a connection which then you build your data source view off of, and in SSIS you have connections from which you push data to and pull data from.

Another thing, in SSAS you can “deploy” right from Visual Studio (BIDS). All these things have a server name. What we have run into is this:

You develop on your local machine, pointing at development server. You deploy to development, your connections are pointing to development, and everything works great. When you deploy to production (usually planned, every 2 weeks, or whatever) you deploy your stuff and what ends up happening?

In SSIS your config files should have a connection string (or however you store it) and it should point to production. But in SSAS, if you deploy from BIDS, your data source will have to change and in the cube project properties you need to change your deployment server.

I have seen countless times, a cube or a connection in SSIS without a config that is running in production, yet pointing at development. We keep our dev data as fresh or very close so sometimes we don’t even notice, but then it happens, something weird is reported and we dig into it, and we find the erroneous connection string.

Here is my solution to the problem:

Developers – go to C:WindowsSystem32DriversEtc and open your Hosts file with notepad or text editor. You then add a couple of entries

#production
#xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx datawarehouse

#development
yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy datawarehouse

where xxx is the ip of your production system, and yyy is the ip of your dev system. the # is the rem/comment out symbol. You can see above I have everything commented out but the line for the dev system. But notice each is pointed to “datawarehouse” so if I ping or connect to “datawarehouse” from Management Studio, or whatever, it goes to the IP I have commented out.

Now, go on to each server, but only add the line that corresponds to that server in the hosts file, or better yet just

127.0.0.1 datawarehouse

Now, when you deploy to either server, and your connections, etc are set to connect to “datawarehouse” you ensure it will always connect to the local server. Brilliant!

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Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

SSAS: Errors in the metadata manager. The dimension with ID of…

Crazy error today. In Analysis Services, (SSAS), some jobs got hung, sync command got hung, and what ended up happening is a cube on the default instance was totally unusable.

Try to delete, rename, resync, redeploy, anything, and I would get the error..

Errors in the metadata manager. The dimension with ID of..

Couldn’t do anything. The solution? I had to stop the SSAS service, go to the OLAP data directory under my SQL install and remove the folder for that cube. I then started the SSAS Service, and the SSAS Database was gone (finally!). I redeployed and reprocessed and everything is working again. Whew 🙂

Categories
Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

SSASMeta – C# App to Log Info About SSAS Objects

I manage some servers that have many cubes. OK, a lot of cubes (60+ on one). I needed some way to output a report of last processed time, last schema update, etc. Now, there are about 5 different ways to do this (one being the SSAS Stored Procedure Project), but this is what I came up with. I wrote a 100 line C# app to take a server name, loop through the SSAS DB’s, cubes, measures, partitions, and dimensions and log info about them.

Here is a c# code snippet of a function that just outputs to the console, the app I have actually logs the info to a SQL Server database and then I can write reports off that.

     private static void LogSSASInfo(string serverName)
        {
            var server = new Server();
            server.Connect(serverName);

            foreach (Database database in server.Databases)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(database.Name + " " + database.LastUpdate + " " + database.EstimatedSize / 1024 + " " + database.CreatedTimestamp);

                foreach (Cube cube in database.Cubes)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("     Cube: " + cube.Name + " " + cube.LastProcessed + " " + cube.LastSchemaUpdate);

                    foreach (MeasureGroup measureGroup in cube.MeasureGroups)
                    {
                        Console.WriteLine("         Measure Group: " + measureGroup.Name + " " + measureGroup.LastProcessed);

                        foreach (Partition partition in measureGroup.Partitions)
                        {
                            Console.WriteLine("             Partition: " + partition.Name + " " + partition.LastProcessed);
                        }
                    }
                }

                foreach (Dimension dimension in database.Dimensions)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(" Dimension: " + dimension.Name + " " + dimension.LastProcessed);
                }

                Console.WriteLine("");
                Console.WriteLine("------------------------------------------------");
                Console.WriteLine("");
            }

            server.Disconnect();
        }

As you can see, it isn’t the most elegant code in the world, but it works. In order to get this to work in your project, you need to reference the Microsoft.AnalysisServices assembly.

ssasmeta

Use your imagination, you could make an app wrap that function above and log info for all the SSAS instances on your network. There have been a few times already in the last year where I have found some cube or measure group not updating correctly and a report like the one I can get now will help dealing with that challenge.

Categories
Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming SQLServerPedia Syndication

SSAS 2005/2008: Creating Sub-Cubes Using XMLA, Variables, and Named Query Where Statements

I blogged a few weeks ago about creating Local Cubes with XMLA and ascmd.exe, and that is pretty cool, works great. There are some snags though if you use a server that is 64 bit. You can’t connect to the local cubes via .NET, Excel, or any other way. There are no drivers for local .cub files for 64-bit Windows. What a downer, and I am not going to wait around for them to come out. So in the mean time, you can easily create “sub cubes” as well in SSAS.

One easy way to create sub cubes is using this method. If you have one dimension that all your measures relate to (or two, usually they all relate to date), but say one dimension that relates to everything is Location, DimLocation. And you want to create sub cubes based on a set of locations. Well what I did was this.

1) In my Data Source View (.dsv) in my SSAS solution, I replaced all views/tables with Named Queries. (you will see why later)

2) Once I have my “main” cube deployed (and processed if you like, doesn’t matter), I need to create an XMLA to create a sub cube.

b4127dbd2c0563eb093464d312c87269

3) In the newly created XMLA you have to edit some things

a) I edit the Database name, and Id

b) search for msprop:QueryBuilder="SpecificQueryBuilder" – this is where your named queries for all your tables are. You can go ahead and add a where statement to each one (eg: WHERE LocationId IN (1,2,3))

c) I usually wrap the whole XMLA in a Batch, and then at the bottom after the </Create> I put a process XMLA

    ProcessFull

4) Run your XMLA and it should create and process a new SSAS db, creating a pre-sliced version of your original cube.

 

Now, there are other ways to do all this stuff, one of them being <Filter> in XMLA, but I couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted, that is why I went this route, and it just so happens that I am lucky enough for one dim to relate to all measures 🙂