Kasper de Jonge PowerPivot Blog

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:

http://www.blue-granite.com/site/Solutions/BlueGraniteNitro/CreatingaSSRSdatasourceforBlueGraniteNitro/tabid/175/Default.aspx

http://www.blue-granite.com/site/Solutions/BlueGraniteNitro/CreatingaSSRSdatasourceforBlueGraniteNitro/tabid/175/Default.aspx

A great TED presentation by David McCandles, the author of the http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ blog.

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.

A few months ago i was nominated for “Dutch BI consultant of the year” at the BI dutch special interest group http://www.bidutch.nl/. The criteria was the sharing of knowledge, I was nominated because of this blog and my upcoming sessions at SQLPass and SQLZaterdag.  The results were determined by an online poll so the voting was open for everyone.

Yesterday at the BI Dutch self service event the results were published. I won by 2 votes Check out the results at bidutch. I would like to thank everyone for voting for me (I love social media) and Johan van der Kooij for nominating me. A great honor to  be chosen. The other consultants are really very good, i even have Peter van Tils books at home.

So onward to more blogging and speaking ! Thanks everyone !

MSDN subscribers can get started developing on the Windows Azure platform today. Starting January 4, 2010, subscribers in many countries (see list on the right) will benefit from compute hours, storage, data transfers, SQL Azure databases and Windows Azure platform AppFabric messages included at no extra charge as part of their subscription. The Windows Azure platform offers a simple, comprehensive, and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services. Hmm now to find some time to play with BI and Azure …

Available in: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.
(Support for other countries will be phased in over time, many coming in 2010)

Thx to Marc Valk for the heads up.

Microsoft has released a new sample database: Contoso. I’ll check it out this weekend and make my new screencast build on this new datasource!

It’s supposed to have millions of rows, great stuff for PowerPivot demo’s.

You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=868662dc-187a-4a85-b611-b7df7dc909fc

Thx Russel for telling us.

Update: when you have trouble unzipping the cube backup use winrar, that will do the trick.

Something i found today is that you can change the dependency of parameters of your dataset by changing the order the the parameters in the data query. For example:

Selecting the internet sales amount with parameters promotion at the year 2008. This will give you all the promotions available.

Changing the order of the parameters

will get you all the promotions in 2005 as parameter values. This is very cool and I don’t know why i missed this all this time, read more at msdn