Have you been looking for a way to measure report performance? Want to know who accesses your reports most frequently? Well there are some free reports on http://msftrsprodsamples.codeplex.com/ that you may already have downloaded and don’t realize it that contains this information. When you download the AdventureWorks Report Samples for either 2005 or 2008 a script to create an RSExecutionLog database, an SSIS package to load it, and a set of auditing reports are available in the extremely long...
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Analysis Services calculations are great for storing formulas that your users need to see on a regular basis. They also have another little feature that adds just a little more wow when your end users browse the cube. By building a color expression on a calculation you can change either the fore color or background color of a measure value. Here you can write an MDX expression that will change the font or background color of a cell when a user selects the calculation. A very basic example is bel...
When developing reports that use Analysis Services as a data source end user can sometimes be confused about some of the options they see in report parameters. Anytime you have a parameter that allows for multiple values to be selected then you will see a (Select All) option that Reporting Services adds that make for an easy way to check off each item in the parameter dropdown. If you followed most of the defaults when developing you dimensions in Analysis Services you likely also have an option...
Many companies are not in a rush to upgrade their SQL Servers because of the enormous cost to upgrade. This results in the majority of companies still running previous versions of SQL Server (2005, 2000, and even earlier). Many times as the developer you are forced to work with older server components but new file sources like Excel 2007 with SQL Server and SSIS 2005. In this case, there are some workarounds that will allow using what seem like two incompatible platforms. This is a highly blogge...
If you experiment at all with transactions that are built into SSIS you will discover that they are highly flawed. For example, if you have a transaction running on an entire package some tasks may not rollback on a failure. A file system task is one of the major culprits that on a failure will not rollback the file operation it is performing. I wish I was writing to give you a solution to that problem today but I’m actually writing to show how you could use a typical database transaction across...