SQLCAT sessions at PASS

Conferences, conferences, conferences… so many to choose from, and most people (me included) can only attend one a year. I spent my money on attending the BI conference in Seattle and so decided not to go to PASS; naturally when Mosha announced his MDX session I was kicking myself and considering splurging a few grand just to see him, although it’s a good thing I didn’t. But if you’re on your way to PASS and looking for some good content then I’ve been asked to direct your attention to the presentations the SQLCAT team are doing:

Various PerformancePoint Information

Things are warming up in advance of the release of PerformancePoint, I see…

First of all, there are some launch events in New York and London:
http://www.microsoft.com/bi/performancepointlaunch/
I’ve registered for the London event, so say hello if you’re going! I see it’s at Vinopolis, so hopefully the drinks will be good; pity it’s on a Tuesday when Borough Market is closed.

If you’re trying to find out more about PerformancePoint, Microsoft have clearly done a deal with the folks at the OLAP Report (why not make my day and buy a subscription?) and made their writeup on it available as a free download from the Microsoft site:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/c/d/3cdc4df9-eb2b-4eb1-b29f-d892f31aa29c/OLAP%20Report%20PPS%20preview.pdf
As you’d expect from Nigel and co it’s pretty even-handed and not afraid to make the odd criticism where necessary.

Books are also starting to appear. I see Nick Barclay has announced two sequels to the excellent BSM book he and Adrian Downes wrote from last year covering the monitoring/analytics and planning sides of things:
http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/2007/09/two-rational-guides-for.html
This made me wonder what other books might be in the pipeline. A quick look on Amazon revealed:

"Microsoft Performance Management: with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007" by Joey Fitts and Bruno Aziza

"Business Intelligence with Microsoft Office PerformancePoint 2007" by Craig Utley

"Administrator’s Guide to Microsoft Office 2007 Servers" by Peter Bruzesse

Scale-Out Querying with Analysis Services Using SAN Snapshots

Those people on the SQLCat team have been busy: yet another white paper is out, this time on scale-out using SAN snapshots. You can download it here:
 

SP2 Slowdown?

 Despite all the performance improvements that have gone into AS SP2, several of my customers reported worse query performance after migrating. Today I saw two new KB articles (frustratingly short on detail) that suggest that these performance problems may have been fixed:
 
Interesting…

Cognos buys Applix

Yet another acquisition, this time Cognos buying Applix… some commentaries:
 
As the second article notes, there’s some overlap between Temtec Executive viewer (which I know a few people are using on top of AS) and Cognos’ own products, so I hope this doesn’t mean another third-party AS client tool will disappear. Also, TM1 currently supports MDX as a query language, but who knows if continuing this support will be a priority for Cognos. What with this and the acquisition of Essbase I hope support for MDX in the wider OLAP community won’t start disappearing.

SCOPE and calculated members

This post on the MSDN forum:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2064643&SiteID=1

…reminded me of something interesting I found out a few months ago. It seems that whereas you can’t mix regular and calculated measures in a set used in the SCOPE statement, you can rewrite the assignment to avoid using SCOPE and do a direct assignment instead. So, for example, if you were trying to assign to a regular measure and a calculated measure using a SCOPE statement like this:

SCOPE({[Measures].[RegularMeasure],[Measures].[CalculatedMeasure]});
    this=1;
END SCOPE;

You would get the following error:

A set has been encountered that cannot contain calculated members.
MdxScript(Cube1) (line, col) A set has been encountered that cannot contain calculated members.
The END SCOPE statement does not match the opening SCOPE statement.
MdxScript(Cube1) (line, col) The END SCOPE statement does not match the opening SCOPE statement.

You could rewrite the assignment as follows using two SCOPEs:

SCOPE([Measures].[RegularMeasure]);
    this=1;
END SCOPE;

SCOPE([Measures].[CalculatedMeasure]);
    this=1;
END SCOPE;

…but this is clearly a pain, as you’re duplicating your assignment logic. What you can do instead is this:

({[Measures].[RegularMeasure],[Measures].[CalculatedMeasure]})=1;

Not as easy to read as using SCOPE, I know, especially if you’re doing something complex, but at least it works! Now I wonder why SCOPE has this problem? Probably something worth opening an issue on Connect about…

White paper on resolving query performance problems

Another great and very detailed white paper from the SQLCat team entitled "Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services". You can download it here:
 
There’s loads of information here I’ve not seen before, for example on Perfmon counters. A must read! 

AS2008 webcast now available

If, like me you missed the recent AS2008 new features webcast then you can now download the recording here:
 
It’s a very good summary of what’s coming, although the content of the presentation contains no major new revelations. The question/answer session is a bit more revealing: we’ll be getting what sounds like very basic execution plans (possibly visual), there’s no LINQ integration as yet, and there are no changes to SSRS/SSAS integration (WHEN are the people in Redmond going to wake up and do something about this???). 

Post-holiday round-up

The worst thing about taking a holiday is coming back home and, despite having taken my laptop with me and checking my mails a few times, finding there are a gazillion emails waiting for me to follow-up. Hohum. Anyway, here are a couple of things that need mentioning…

First of all, registration is open for the next BI evening in London on September 26th:
http://www.sqlserverfaq.com/

There’s also a whole load of new stuff up at the SQLBits site, including some sessions (though not mine yet) and speakers:
http://www.sqlbits.com/

You can register for the conference here:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032349295&Culture=en-GB

I see Vidas Matelis has picked up some more useful snippets of new features in AS2008 from a recent webcast:
http://www.ssas-info.com/VidasMatelisBlog/29_ssas-2008-katmai-info-from-august-9th-webcast#more-29

I missed the main webcast on the wider changes (originally billed as just being about the time series algorithm but it seems to have had its scope widened) in AS2008 but it looks like the recording should be available soon:
https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/content/content.aspx?ContentID=6194

PerformancePoint CTP4 has been released and can be downloaded from Connect. David Francis has a feature list:
http://blogs.conchango.com/davidfrancis/archive/2007/08/16/PerformancePoint-CTP4-now-available.aspx

I also received a copy of Marco Russo’s new book "Introducing Microsoft LINQ". I won’t be reviewing here because I’m not really qualified to do so, but from the point of view of someone whose dev skills are pretty basic it looks like a good introduction to the subject.

SQLBits and the next BI Evening

I’ve been meaning to blog about these two events for a while but somehow not got round to doing so…
 
Anyway, first date for your diary is the evening of September 26th when the next BI evening will be held in London, at the offices of IM Group. Registration isn’t open yet (I’ll update this post when it is) but there will be two speakers:
 
Suranjan Som of IM Group:
Data Mining in practice – the Microsoft Way
Data Mining has come a long way from being a black art to a contemporary tool that allows businesses to unearth the hidden potential in their data. Come and join us for a whirlwind that looks how one can leverage data mining to address business problems using the new features in SQL 2005/2008.
Mark Hill of Edenbrook:
What’s new in the SQL2008 relational engine for BI?
How does Katmai change how we do MS BI projects, Mark Hill takes a look at the planned improvements such as CDC and UPSERT and what impact they will have followed by couple of demos on how these new features can be used.
 
Even more exciting, on Saturday October 6th is the first SQLBits community day at Microsoft in Reading. It’s a free one-day event concentrating on all things SQL Server, kind of a SQL version of Developer Day, and you can find out more here:
Again, registration isn’t open yet but we are looking for speakers and sponsors so please get in touch through the site if you’re interested in doing either. For my sins I’m helping organise the BI/DW track, so hopefully I’ll see you there!