How do I learn about Microsoft BI
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Archive for the ‘SSAS’ Category.
PowerPivot for Excel is new name for Gemini
Microsoft announced yesterday that the “Gemini” capabilities of Office 2010 / SQL Server 2008 R2 will be released under the brand, PowerPivot for Excel 2010… There’s a new site up and running dedicated to the product with little data as yet, however the Public Beta will be available in November.
Analysis Services: Increase Drill-through Rows in Excel 2007
More of a placeholder for me because I keep forgetting. You know (probably) the scenario where you have enabled more than the default 1,000 drill-through rows in your SSAS Cube but Excel is still stubbornly limiting the drill-through to 1,000 rows.
You need to edit the data connection in Excel as per the picture below to increase the default.
Nice… first baby steps with Gemini
I was able (thanks to some friends at Microsoft) to download and install the SQL 2008 R2 August CTP and Microsoft Office 2010 “Gemini” add-in…
Gemini is effectively an Excel Add-in…. and appears as an additional tab on the Ribbon…
First I tried to just get some simple stuff together by getting some data from the Access Northwind database..I was taken through a neat little import wizard, selected all the Northwind tables and the result was a report on what had been imported
On returning the data to Gemini (note that we’re not really in Excel here – still in Gemini) we can view existing and (if necessary) create new table relationships within Gemini… This is useful where you start to drag in related data from multiple sources.
I like it…. in no time at all I’d got together a basic sales Pivot Table with a couple of slicers
Kilimanjaro – is this the knockout punch from Microsoft?
SQL Server Kilimanjaro and Project Madison
This week the BI Conference has kicked off with an announcement! There will be a BI focused release of SQL Server code named Kilimanjaro which is expected H1 2010 with CTPs available within the next 12 months. Kilimanjaro is focused on "People Ready BI".
A key component of Kilimanjaro is "Project Gemini", this is all about self-service BI using Excel. The vision behind Gemini is to free IT resources by giving business intelligence analysis and reporting capabilities to the end-users without IT losing control.
Is this where Microsoft finally fill the gap left when they shoe-horned some parts of Proclarity in to PPS, leaving themselves without a great stand-alone OLAP client tool? Let’s hope so… I am a little uncertain as to the direction that they are taking BI in. As a once frustrated end-user, I can see how the masses of information workers will love the capabilities. I can also see that this may well lead to a huge increase in unstructured an potentially conflicting information if not managed very carefully.
At the same Microsoft will be releasing "Project Madison", this is the integration of Datallegro which will offer you an easy scale out solution to support data warehouses of up to 100s of terabytes.
All in all very exciting news and I will keep you up-to-date whenever I learn more. I am certainly hoping for more information on the management of the data, how this fits with the overall DW framework, and mysterious lack of information to date on PerformancePoint2…
SQL 2008 Goes “Live”
Although SQL Server 2008 was “launched” last February at a marketing event that also featured Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, this week Microsoft finally released its database software to manufacturing.
SQL Server 2008 is available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will also be available for evaluation downloads. Pricing for the database will be the same as the previous version, SQL Server 2005.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/default.aspx Has Ent, Dev, Std, Web and Workgroup for subscriber downloads, can’t see Express or Ent Trial yet on the non subscriber pages.
Also Eval Edition and Feature Pack are now available
If you need some help installing, see this SQL School Video
