One of the surprising things for me when I joined the SSAS team is when I got a meeting request to attend a bug triage one of the first weeks I was here in Redmond. The title of the meeting was “bug triage”. I worked in a hospital before so I knew what triaging was. As Wikipedia puts it: “Triage is the process of determining the priority of patients’ treatments based on the severity of their condition.” So I figured what do we have to do with triaging?
As it turns out in these meetings we look at all open bugs / suggestions that come in. As you can imagine during the development of a product as large as SQL Server or part of it Analysis services: a lot of bugs are found, part by manual testing and part by automated tests. In the meeting all disciplines within the team are represented, there will be Testers, Developers and Program managers.
At these triage meetings we look at these bugs / suggestions and consider if they meet the bar for fixing the problem or build the suggestion. As you can imagine at the start of the release all bugs are fixed but as time progresses and the deadline comes closer the bar to fix bugs becomes higher and higher. We take a lot of things into account, how much time will it take to fix it, is it potentially destabilizing, do we have a good workaround, how many people will encounter this, will they know how to solve it. This all takes into account whether we fix it or not. And trust me these meetings are never easy, a lot of discussion goes on. But at some point we have to draw a line and get the product out of the door, of course severe cases could change this but the process that surrounds shipping a product makes the likelihood of such a bug being found that late in the cycle very unlikely.
A fun and interesting part of the bug / suggestions pile are the ones that are files by customers on the connect site. They are automatically added to the same pile as the ones that are filed by the product teams themselves. All bugs and suggestions filed by customer will go through the same triage committees, everything you post on connect will be visual to the product teams and conscious decisions are made by them regarding the bugs / suggestions. Bugs filed by customers are often regarded with higher importance as the bugs that are filed internally, the fact that the filer comes across this bug makes it very likely others will come across it as well.
Part of getting a public CTP out of the door is to get feedback from customers. So if you see something you don’t like at all or found a bug please do not hesitate to file an item on connect. This will give us the feedback we need to make the product even better! If you want to know when the next public CTP will be released, sign up here. Of course filing bugs can also be done on a already released product, so if you want to change the product you use every day, file a suggestion.
I’m very excited that I will be presenting a session on what is new in DAX for SQL 11 on TechEd 2011 this year:
Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) is a new calculation language introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 within PowerPivot. DAX is an extension to the Excel formula syntax and offers information workers an intuitive yet powerful tool to add business logic to their PowerPivot applications. In SQL Server code-named “Denali”, with the introduction of the BI Semantic Model, DAX becomes a key component of any Corporate Business Intelligence application built on the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack. The goal of this session is to introduce you to the concepts in DAX, how to add calculated columns and measure to your model, and the new DAX features coming in “Denali”.
You can also find me at the Self Service BI booth in the exhibit area.
Of course there will be several colleagues that will do other very interesting session on the new design tools, general overview of Denali and of course Crescent (+way more).
One of the major subjects that are talked about in the US is finance. One of those topics is the US debt. I got a mail today that someone published a book about the subject:
So you think why do I blog about it ? Well he did all his research using PowerPivot (and you can actually download the workbook on the site )!.
A quote from his site:
The information presented in this book comes from public sources. Where possible, the data was pulled directly from the government agency (e.g., the Bureau of Public Debt, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, etc.) responsible for collecting and producing a given data set. The charts and tables were created in Excel 2010. I used a new Excel add-in, called PowerPivot (www.powerpivot.com), to
gather and store data from multiple sources
create relationships among different data sets
define custom calculations (e.g., last non-empty, yearly changes, etc.)
analyze the data using Excel PivotTables and PivotCharts
An Excel workbook, which contains much of the data I present in this book, is available below. If you want to dive further into a particular subject area, you’ll need to a copy of Office 2010 Professional (the PowerPivot add-in is free). I plan to post a brief tutorial for those who want to get more familiar with the data modeling and analysis techniques used in the workbook. In the meantime, take a look at my August 2010 Article in SQL Server Magazine to learn more about PowerPivot (see the author page for a link).
Today I heard that the Kimball Group recently released the 2nd edition of their book, The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit. This is the must read for all datawarehouse developers /architects. The cool thing is that is now featuring SQL Server 2008 R2 !
For those of you who don’t posses the first edition or don’t know it by heart here is what to book is about:
Best practices and invaluable advice from world-renowned data warehouse expertsIn this book, leading data warehouse experts from the Kimball Group share best practices for using the upcoming “Business Intelligence release” of SQL Server, referred to as SQL Server 2008 R2. In this new edition, the authors explain how SQL Server 2008 R2 provides a collection of powerful new tools that extend the power of its BI toolset to Excel and SharePoint users and they show how to use SQL Server to build a successful data warehouse that supports the business intelligence requirements that are common to most organizations. Covering the complete suite of data warehousing and BI tools that are part of SQL Server 2008 R2, as well as Microsoft Office, the authors walk you through a full project lifecycle, including design, development, deployment and maintenance.
Features more than 50 percent new and revised material that covers the rich new feature set of the SQL Server 2008 R2 release, as well as the Office 2010 release
Includes brand new content that focuses on PowerPivot for Excel and SharePoint, Master Data Services, and discusses updated capabilities of SQL Server Analysis, Integration, and Reporting Services
Shares detailed case examples that clearly illustrate how to best apply the techniques described in the book
The accompanying Web site contains all code samples as well as the sample database used throughout the case studies
The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit, Second Edition provides you with the knowledge of how and when to use BI tools such as Analysis Services and Integration Services to accomplish your most essential data warehousing tasks.
I just installed a great BI app on my Windows phone 7 called BlueGranite Nitro. It’s a free app you can use on top of an XML file (SSRS report’s can generate one for your !). And the best thing is it is for free !
Here is how it looks:
Awesome, right ?!?
All you have to do is create a Reporting services report that has the data you want to analyze on your phone:
All you have to do is: point to the report in the BI app, add the XML renderformat parameters to transform the report into XML and you are done ! This gives us a lot possibilities, you can base your report on top of SQL, SSAS, PowerPivot or whatever you like. You can have your data cached or refreshed every few minutes.
Unfortunately I don’t have a outfacing RS myself to try my own reports on my phone but this app seems very promising.
update:
Today I found a walk through on what you need to do to create a SSRS report that renders specific charts, you really need this when you want to build a report on your own:
David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.
I believe we as BI professionals need to rethink about how we represent the data and not rely on the default reporting tools available. I understand this has a lot to do with the time alloted to our thinking time by the customer but we should at least try. And of course we see a lot of the vendors work on new ways to visualize data out of the box with things like the PivotViewer or Tableau.
Check out my blog post on how to build amazing visualisation with the PivotViewer yourself.
well i was out living the Burgundian lifestyle in Burgundy france at maison perdue:
That means relaxing, drinking wine, eating cheese:
and not doing PowerPivot (ok ok i read Denny Lee’s PowerPivot book, more about that later). We had a great week and i love the burgundy area of France, nice people, great food and our accommodation was great.
But now i’m back and i already got a new blog post lined up !
Ok nothing to do with BI but i was playing around with security on my PowerPivot test machine where i have everything on one machine, even AD. Adding a user when you have AD installed requeres some additional actions. First add a user using “active directory user and computers” . This is easy The problem starts when you want to log in (or run a service) with this user. You get the message “1385: Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer.”.
You have to make sure this user can either log on or run as service. To do this you have to poke around in domain policy’s. To do this go to start, run, “gpmc.msc”. Now here come the trick, go to “Default Domain Controllers Policy” right mouse click, edit.
Now we can go to the allow log on localy policy:
Dubbel click on the policy to add your new user to the policy. He now can log on on the machine.
When you would like this username to run as a service you need to go to the policy “log on as a service” in the same list and addyour user there.
Ok now you are ready for your user, all you need to do is propagate the policy to you machine by using the “gpupdate” command.
