Creating local cubes with AMO

Interesting nugget from the MSDN Forum, in a post by Adrian Dumitrascu: you can create local cubes in AMO. Here’s the text of the post:
 
AMO (Analysis Management Objects, the object model for administering AS2005, the successor for DSO from AS2000) also works with local cube files (.cub). You can use it to create/alter objects or to refresh the data by re-processing every night, as you mentioned.
Sample code to connect to a local cube file:

using Microsoft.AnalysisServices; // the .dll is in "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\SDK\Assemblies", also in GAC

…

Server server = new Server();
server.Connect(@"Data Source=c:\MyLocalCube.cub"); // this will create an empty local cube if not there already
… // do something, for example process cubes
server.Disconnect();

 
Makes sense that you can do this, when you think about it, given that everything’s XMLA behind the scenes.

Scaling Out SSAS

Yet another new white paper, this time on scaling out Analysis Services:
Interesting and good that they don’t shy away from the things that don’t work so well. I’ve heard a few people complain that the built-in sychronisation doesn’t work well with complex (ie lots of dimensions/attributes/partitions as opposed to large) databases, and although I’ve not had any practical experience myself that reflects this the paper does refer to the synchronise functionality as being "quite robust" just before it describes how to do the same thing in a SSIS package using Robocopy to copy the AS data folder.

BI Survey

It’s BI Survey time again! Wasn’t it the OLAP Survey last year? Anyway, it always makes for a fascinating read when it comes out. Here’s the blurb:
 
We would very much welcome your participation in The BI Survey. This is the largest independent survey of OLAP users worldwide. The Survey will obtain input from a large number of users to better understand their buying decisions, the implementation cycle and the business success achieved. Both business and technical respondents are welcome.

 The BI Survey is strictly independent. While vendors assist by inviting users to participate in the Survey, the vendors do not sponsor the survey, nor influence the questionnaire design or survey results. As a participant, you will not only have the opportunity to ensure your experiences are included in the analyses, but you will also receive a summary of the results from the full survey. You will also have a chance of winning one of ten $50 Amazon vouchers. Click here to complete the survey on-line:

Top Ten Best Practices for Processing and Querying AS

Two excellent new papers published today, on best practices for AS processing and query performance:
There’s a lot of useful information in both which isn’t present in the AS Performance Guide or in other sources.

Reporting Services, MDX and Aggregated Values

Undoubtedly the best time to find out about an undocumented change in functionality in a product is halfway through a demo of said functionality to a large group of people. This happened to me last week: I was teaching my MDX course (written on the last CTP of SP2) and had just finished my speech on all the rubbish aspects of Reporting Services/Analysis Services integration and was trying to show how Reporting Services automatically filtered out all but the lowest level of granularity of data from an MDX query (see Teo Lachev’s post here: http://prologika.com/CS/blogs/blog/archive/2006/02/08/853.aspx and Reed Jacobsen’s posts here: http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/hitachiconsulting/archive/2006/08/07/22359.aspx and here: http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/hitachiconsulting/archive/2006/08/04/22346.aspx for details) when I found that it wasn’t doing it any more. Later on I emailed Teo to ask if he knew anything about this change – he didn’t but he asked the RS dev team and they gave him some details (he then blogged about it here: http://prologika.com/CS/blogs/blog/archive/2007/06/10/aggregate-rows-and-sp2.aspx). So, a small victory for the people – Reporting Services now no longer tries to force its own aggregation functionality on you and you always see the full results of your query, unless you’re already using the RS Aggregate function in your reports. This is apparently in response to customer demand. Just be sure to check any existing RS/AS reports you’ve got in production to make sure they’re not displaying extra rows now!

I’m now hopeful that the message will get through about the other stupid restrictions that RS places on AS data sources, such as only being able to put the measures dimension on columns. I’ve not kept up with the changes in RS2008 as much as I should (Teo again has a good overview of what’s coming here: http://prologika.com/CS/blogs/blog/archive/2007/06/09/teched-2007-us-memoirs.aspx) but I’ve not heard that these restrictions will be lifted. The problem is of course that RS expects to do all the aggregation of data itself, but the RS dev team don’t seem to understand that if I’m using AS then I will have designed all my aggregation business logic into my cubes and dimensions and I couldn’t care less about what RS can do in this area (for an example of their mindset, see the somewhat patronising comments on this posting on Connect from last year: http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=125414).

While we’re talking about Katmai I might as well mention why I’ve not blogged about the new AS features in it – it’s because there aren’t all that many. You’ve probably already read Mosha’s post about the attribute relationship designer (http://sqlblog.com/blogs/mosha/archive/2007/06/07/katmai-june-ctp-attribute-relationships-tab.aspx); Vidas Matelis has covered the other cube design wizard changes here: http://www.ssas-info.com/VidasMatelisBlog/?p=22#more-22. More features will come in later CTPS but overall it’s really going to be all about performance improvements and manageability, and while I know a bit about some of the planned features it’s too early to blog about them because it’s too early to say what’s going to actually get included. Suffice to say that for the serious AS developer there are going to be some very welcome improvements but there won’t be anything that excites the marketing people.

Microsoft buys Stratature

Microsoft have been on a bit of a buying spree this week: after the Dundas deal they’ve now gone and bought the MDM vendor Stratature. Take a look at Stratature’s site for more details:
Jamie Thomson has some extra information here:
 
Yet another step closer to Microsoft having a complete BI stack…

SQL2008 Webcasts

Via Euan Garden, here are some upcoming webcasts on new SQL2008 (Katmai) functionality:
…including one on new dimension design features in AS.

Katmai Public CTP / Dundas Deal

I’m not at TechEd so this is second-hand news, but two big announcements: first of all, the first public CTP of Katmai is available for download on Connect; secondly, and more interestingly, a deal has been done where Microsoft has licensed Dundas’ data visualisation components. Russell Christopher has the best breakdown of this deal I’ve seen so far here:
He’s right in wondering whether the OLAP component is part of this deal – that’s the big question from the AS point of view.
 
UPDATE: see Russell’s comment below – the OLAP components (http://www.dundas.com/Products/Chart/NET/OLAP/index.aspx) are part of the deal! For me, the obvious use is as a replacement for OWC, not just instead BI Development Studio but as a free component that anyone developing a thick/thin client for Analysis Services can use. Next question: does licensing the components mean that Microsoft can now give them away for free like this? Or can it only use them embedded in its own products?

Generating Excel 2007 workbooks linked to SSAS using SSRS and OfficeWriter

Here’s the second of my (paid-for) articles for the folks at Softartisans:

http://officewriter.softartisans.com/officewriter-410.aspx

This time they wanted me to write something about using OfficeWriter with Analysis Services, and after a bit of thinking I came up with the idea of trying to generate Excel workbooks using OfficeWriter and Reporting Services that use the new Excel 2007 cube functions so that they have live links back to Analysis Services. After a lot of sweat I got it to work, and I have to thank Excel MVP Charley Kyd (the guy behind the Excel BI site http://www.exceluser.com/) for giving me the solution to the problem of OfficeWriter writing values to the cell Value rather than Formula property. Hopefully this is the sort of thing that could be made easier when/if OfficeWriter gets integrated with SSRS in Katmai.

Book Review: The Rational Guide to Business Scorecard Manager 2005, by Nick Barclay and Adrian Downes

I’ve got an admission to make: I’ve never really done anything seriously with Business Scorecard Manager (perhaps European businesses are less interested in formal methodologies like the Balanced Scorecard?), so when Nick Barclay asked me if I’d like a free copy of his new book about it I was very interested to see it so I could get up to speed. Having been a long-time reader of his blog (http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/) and also having recently started reading his co-author Adrian Downes’ blog (http://adriandownes.blogspot.com/), I had high expectations since both are among the best Microsoft BI-related blogs out there and I wasn’t disappointed.

BSM2005 isn’t a massive topic, and as such is an ideal fit for the Rational Guide series where books are limited to 224 pages in length to make sure they’re as concise as possible. In a world where most IT books seem to be doorstop-sized this is a welcome move, and although Nick and Adrian have sidestepped this constraint by making a couple of extra chapters download-only the book is very to-the-point without descending to Books Online territory. The technical side of things is handled with great clarity and there’s also a healthy amount of discussion of the theory of performance management too. The text is clearly laid out with a lot of illustrations and all processes are broken up into numbered steps making it all very readable.

The one obvious (and probably unfair, but it’s what everyone will be thinking) criticism that can be made about this book is that it’s about BSM2005 rather than the forthcoming PerformancePoint. Hopefully the authors are planning to update it as soon as PerformancePoint gets released, whenever that will be – it seems like the entire Microsoft BI world has been holding its breathe waiting for PerformancePoint for so long we’re in danger of turning blue and fainting. Apart from that, if you’re about to start a project involving BSM2005 I can’t imagine a better resource to have on your desk.

You can buy it from Amazon UK here.