Vidas Matelis Analysis Services Blog

This year I’ll be attending SQLPASS 2011 in Seattle.
I am scheduled to volunteer at Expert Pods on Wednesday, October 12th between 10am and 12pm.
On Friday I’ll be acting as a host for one of “Birds of a Feather” lunch tables. Topic for my table will be “SSAS Management Using Scripts”.

Looking forward to meeting there my blog readers!

I already wrote about my experience in the SSAS maestro program and today I can share with you that I am one of the first 11 SSAS Maestros!  The official announcement on the first wave of SSAS Maestros was posted on the SQLCat.com website today. I am very happy to have received this award as it was a very challenging but worthwhile experience .

A big congratulations to all of the SSAS Maestro recipients: Ulf Ackerman, Alberto Ferrari, Greg Galloway, Darren Gosbell, Dirk Gubbels, Michael Horne, Marco Russo, Harlan Smith, Chris Webb and John Welch.

This blog post is about my experience in the SSAS Maestro program. As I am writing this post (May 1st, 2011), I still don’t know if I passed all of the necessary requirements to become a SSAS Maestro, and it will take a few more weeks or even months till the lab, exam and case study results will be available. There is a very good chance that I have not achieved the SSAS Maestro requirements, as this course and the tests were very difficult. However, I still want to share my experience, as I strongly believe that this was by far the best training on SSAS that I have ever participated in. Read the rest of this entry »

In a few weeks I am planning to go to Redmond for “SSAS Maestro” training. I am very excited that I was accepted for this training and I want to prepare for it as much as I can. As I was going through available SSAS papers, I realized that quick list of SSAS white papers could be useful for other SSAS developers, so I am posting it here:

• SQL Server 2008 White Paper: Analysis Services Performance Guide
• Analysis Services Processing Best Practices
• Analysis Services 2005 Processing Architecture
• Analysis Services Distinct Count Optimization
• Analysis Services Distinct Count Optimization Using Solid State Devices
• Analysis Services Many-to-Many Dimensions: Query Performance Optimization Techniques
• SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (SSAS) Server Properties
• Running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services on Windows Server 2008 vs. Windows Server 2003 and Memory Preallocation: Lessons Learned
• SQL Server Best Practices Article: Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services
• Analysis Services ROLAP for SQL Server Data Warehouses
• Scale-Out Querying for Analysis Services with Read-Only Databases
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Consolidation Best Practices

I just came back from SQL PASS Summit 2009. About a week before that I started to use Twitter and I tried to “tweet” during the conference as much as I can. My Twitter ID is: http://twitter.com/VidasM. I decided that some of my posts could be interesting to people who do not use Twitter, so I cleaned them up a bit and posted them here.

Read the rest of this entry »

For the last 2 years I attended the Microsoft BI conference which I enjoyed very much. This year I’ll be going to Seattle to attend the PASS Community Summit 2009 (Nov 3-5th, 2009).  Although the PASS Community Summit is not a BI specific conference, I am quite surprised that there will be so many BI sessions. In my event planner I added 3-4 sessions that I would love to attend for almost each time slot . The good news is that all of the sessions will be recorded and attendees have a choice – watch them for free later online, or just buy the DVD with recordings.

This year, I’ll be volunteering at some of the PASS Community Summit events.

On Tuesday, November 3rd during lunch (between 11:45am and 1:00pm) there will be a “Birds of a Feather” event. That is a topic-based luncheon where a number of tables will be marked and discussion facilitated by MVPs or Microsoft employees. I will be volunteering at this event and for my table I choose the topic: “Gemini’s impact on SSAS/Data Warehouse projects“. As you know, with the release of Gemini, power Excel users will be able load data from different sources and build very powerful pivot reports without any help from IT. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I posted about my tests working with Gemini and bigger tables. I realized myself and Chris Webb also suggested that my method of generating new records by simply duplicating them probably affected my results. So I ran more tests with different data. Read the rest of this entry »

Gemini was released about a week ago and I was playing with it almost every evening. I am still trying to understand what it is, how it works, what its limitations are, how to use DAX, etc. And I can say that I like what I see so far. Kasper de Jonge and Chris Webb already posted their initial Gemini reviews. In this post I will share my experience with Gemini so far.

First of all I want to point that for Gemini tests all you need is Excel 2010 and the Gemini Add-in file (it is just about 30MB). You do not need SQL Server 2008R2. I am pointing this out because as I was setting up my testing environment I installed SQL Server 2008R2 and later realized that it is not required. It is quite amazing that this 30MB add in file contains such powerfull software – the Gemini front-end, and the in memory Analysis Services server. Of course for Enterprise level installation you will need SQL Server 2008R2 and Sharepoint 2010, but such setup is not part of my current tests. Read the rest of this entry »