Virtualization offers multiple benefits to production technological environments. But what virtualization means to you, individual software developers/consultants? To me, it allows to: – Prevent one application from impacting another, including times when upgrades or changes are made; – Duplicate a standard environment and speed up new system configuration; – Deploy different technologies on a single [...]
We all look for ways to optimize our performance in many areas. SQL or ETL development isn’t an exception as it involves numerous tasks daily. Remember the 80/20 rule For us, database and data warehouse developers, this rule is: 80% of the time we use “SELECT FROM table” query, and optimizing its call is very easy! SELECT [...]
How do you make sure business metadata your clients will be using for reports meet their needs? I generate an Excel spreadsheet with lists of measures and dimensions and their properties and present them to my clients for reconciliation. They review the definitions and suggest names that are more intuitive for the business. They also [...]
If you’re overwhelmed by the complexity of a business intelligence project, focus on five major activities that comprise it: Requirements gathering Dimensional modeling ETL and OLAP development User acceptance testing (UAT) support Production support Business Intelligence Roadmap cart highlights major BI tasks and their relative durations: As you can see from the chart, ETL and [...]
If you’re deciding what edition of SQL Server to obtain for your business intelligence (BI) system, I suggest narrow your list down to the following 7 important features for BI. First, consider the costs of two products: Standard Edition – $7,499 per processor Enterprise Edition – $28,749 per processor By looking at the differences, many [...]
If you are starting in business intelligence development and would like to get a sense of scope and get familiar with basics, you can: Watch Business Intelligence Webinars provided by Pragmatic Works Get to know the Report Builder Learn How to communicate OLAP Cube Design Decisions to Clients
There are several techniques you can apply to develop reports with Microsoft SQL Server Report Builder 3.0: Start reporting with Report Builder Implementing parameterized dates ranges Filtering parameter values list Implementing ‘Start From’ date parameter Cascading parameters Implementing interactive sort Automate report deployment
After you have created reports in the development environment, are you wondering how to deploy them to UAT or Production server? Luckily, there’s a Reporting Services Scripter utility that allows you to script SQL Server Reporting objects, including your reports, data sources, datasets, and user roles. Select reports and datasets you need to deploy to [...]
So you want to allow your report users sort data interactively. First, decide what the default sorting should be. Tip: It is beneficial to rely on an attribute ordering defined in your OLAP cube. When properly defined, the ‘Unknown’ member will appear on the bottom of the list. So, remove any sorting specifications (follow the [...]
To simplify filter selection for report user, you can create a series of related parameters so that the values of next parameter depend on the selection in previous one. This is fairly easy, and Report Builder will set most of the relationships between parameters for you automatically. (Read before how to add parameters to your [...]
Olga Klimova
business intelligence consultant
Published with SQLServerCentral
Phone: (905) 845-6673
olga@returnonintelligence.ca
Twitter: @oklimova
LinkedIn: OlgaKlimova