Vidas Matelis Analysis Services Blog

 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.

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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. 

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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 »

Few years ago on my blog I posted scripts “SSIS Package to drop/create partitions based on partition list in the SQL Server table” and “SSIS package that process all partitions/measure groups/cubes in one database“. These posts contained partial scripts that I developed for company “Insight Decision Solutions Inc.” to maintain partitions in the Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. This company sells, customizes and implements pre-packaged data warehouse solution (using SQL Server, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS, SharePoint and Excel 2007) for “Life” and “Health” insurance companies. Recently “Insight Decision Solutions Inc.” owners let me post full script on how to automate SSAS partition management . Here are step by step instructions that I adjusted and tested on Adventure Works database. Most of the code comes from my earlier published posts, here I just added information how everything works together.

Read more and download code here…

New SSAS 2008 DMVs allows you to easily access Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) metadata – information about cubes, dimensions, measure groups, measures, etc. As with DMVs metadata information is returned in the data set format, it is very easy to build Reporting Services reports to generate documentation about your database.

You can execute SSAS DMV queries directly in the Analysis Services environment, but this approach has a lot of limitations – most importantly you can not do joins between DMVs. To go around this limitation, I created linked server from SQL Server to Analysis Services. This way I can do joins between DMVs. Here is the script that was used to create linked server: Read the rest of this entry »

I pre-ordered ”Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services Unleashed” (Amazon links: US, UK and Canada) some time ago and today I finally received it. The authors are Irina Gorbach, Alexander Berger and Edward Melomed. This book is the second edition of the older book “Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services” (Amazon links: US, UK and Canada). It has the same structure as the older book – the same 9 parts, but the 41 chapters are slightly different.

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I recently posted a new PowerShell script to process all dimensions and cubes in the specified Analysis Services database. This script has a few additional parameters that give you more control for your SSAS DB processing. First of all, you can specify the MaxParallel processing parameter to control the level of parallelism. You can also specify how many processing commands you want to execute per batch.  Read the rest of this entry »

Previously, the majority of my scripting code was done either in the SSIS script component or in WSH. But now it is time to learn PowerShell as Microsoft included it with SQL Server 2008. I find that PowerShell has its own specific requirements - like restrictive Execution Policy or the need to load a namespace definition. I have a document where I posted my findings and links to useful PowerShell resources. I’ll keep updating that document as I learn PowerShell myself, so make sure you check it when you begin to use PowerShell. Read the rest of this entry »

I will be doing a presentation “Introduction to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services” for Toronto SQL Server user group on November 13, 2008. Come and join us if you are just starting to learn about Analysis Services and live in the Toronto area.

Presentation description:

The main purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate what Analysis Services is and how you can start using SSAS for your company. We will create a simple SSAS database solution, deploy it and then query the SSAS database using Microsoft Excel 2007. You will also get an idea about what the MDX language is.
Targeted audience – SQL Server DBA/Developers who want to learn how to use Microsoft Analysis Services.

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.

In Analysis Services 2008 Microsoft introduced many schema rowsets that are very similar to SQL Server Data Management Views (DMVs). Although in Books Online Microsoft refers to these new tables as “schema rowsets”, it is just easier for now to call them DMVs. You can use these DMVs to query SSAS 2008 metadata and actual data. Here is the link  to my original post about DMVs.

You can execute queries on DMVs directly in Analysis Services. For example you can connect to Analysis Services from SQL Server Management Studio, choose menu item “File”->”New”->”Analysis Services MDX Query” and write your query to select data from DMV.

You can also execute queries against SSAS DMVs from SQL Server environment. At this point I believe this is going to be preferred method to query SSAS DMVs. This is because queries on DMVs in Analysis Services has many limitations, yet these limitations do not exists for queries from SQL Server linked server. Example of such very important limitation – in Analysis services you cannot join 2 DMVs.

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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 »

In SQL Server 2008 Microsoft introduced “Management Data Warehouse” (MDW). This blog post should give you a good idea on what to expect from this new feature. Note: All tests and screenshots for this post were done in SQL Server 2008 February CTP (CTP6). 

Before starting MDW configuration please make sure that your SQL Server Agent is running. You can configure Management Data Warehouse by going into SQL Server Management studio, then expanding Management folder and right mouse clicking on Data Collection folder and choosing “Configure Management Data Warehouse”. This will start wizard that will ask you MDW database connection information (server, database and authentication). As MDW database puts some overhead for the server, in production environment you probably will want to have this database on a separate server. After wizard completes you should see green arrows for Data collection items:

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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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Today I received an e-mail from Microsoft telling me that I received the Microsoft MVP award ”for efforts in SQL technical communities during the past year”. I am very happy and excited about this.

I already made the necessary arrangements and bought airplane tickets to the Microsoft MVP summit in Seattle on April 14-17th.

I am sure that I will have a very exciting year ahead.

Link to my MVP profile.