Today my colleague Julie Strauss showed me this neat trick to get this:
Or
This feature is in PowerPivot since the beginning. The PowerPivot windows gets his color from the color setting in Excel.
You can set it in Excel here:
Happy PowerPivot coloring 
I wanted to share this cool program that will start in the next month: The SSAS Maestro program. There are more and more enterprises are using SSAS for large implementation, like Yahoo’s 12 TB SSAS cube as you could have seen on SQLPass. That means also that these large servers and cubes have to be maintained and developed as well. This asks for a more in depth knowledge only a few people in the world currently posses.
The new SSAS Maestro Program is a three-day, deep-dive course on Analysis Services 2008 R2 gives architects and consultants the education and hands-on experience needed to deliver highest scalable OLAP solutions.
Prepared and presented by top industry experts and the SQL Server Analysis Server team, this intensive course gives top SSAS professionals the education and hands-on experience needed to deliver highly complex and highly scalable OLAP solutions using Analysis Services 2008 R2. Today, there is increasing need for expertise to architect deliver and maintain mission critical OLAP deployments and the primary objective of this course is equip you with the latest SSAS best practices and case studies.
SSAS Maestro Program Benefits
Upon successful completion of this course, assessment and case study evaluation by industry experts, attendees will:
As you can see this is not for the faint of hearts You have to live and breathe SSAS for a few years to be able to pass this. So most candidates are known by Microsoft (local subsidiaries, SQLCat or the product team) and invited directly. This will help us spread the in depth knowledge of SSAS to our top partners who can share it further along.
Isn’t this very cool…
I had a question about how to do Slowly changing dimensions in PowerPivot yesterday on my ask a questions page and decided to share two excellent solutions. First a quick refresher on what actually is a slowly changing dimension ? It probably is something we all came across one time or another but didn’t recognize it as such. Wikipedia gives a pretty good description:
Dimension is a term in data management and data warehousing that refers to logical groupings of data such as geographical location, customer information, or product information. Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCDs) are dimensions that have data that changes slowly, rather than changing on a time-based, regular schedule.
For example, you may have a dimension in your database that tracks the sales records of your company’s salespeople. Creating sales reports seems simple enough, until a salesperson is transferred from one regional office to another. How do you record such a change in your sales dimension?
You could sum or average the sales by salesperson, but if you use that to compare the performance of salesmen, that might give misleading information. If the salesperson that was transferred used to work in a hot market where sales were easy, and now works in a market where sales are infrequent, her totals will look much stronger than the other salespeople in her new region, even if they are just as good. Or you could create a second salesperson record and treat the transferred person as a new sales person, but that creates problems also.
There is more to it like different types and such which you can read all about in PowerPivot. I could make and example myself but there are two sources that already did it for me, one is Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari’s book PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning (chapter 7) or see this other solution on this blog post: http://bennyaustin.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/powerpivot-dax-expression-for-type-2-scd-lookup/
So as you can see it is possible using PowerPivot, but you need a proficient amount of knowledge of DAX to pull it off.
I recently ran across a SharePoint issue that prevented the generation of a thumbnail of workbooks in my PowerPivot gallery. First of all i use the blog post of Dave Wickert Troubleshooting Gallery specific issues to debug my problems. Using this I found a solution to the following problem:
In a few installations where I created a new web application using a hostheader, the PowerPivot thumbnails turned into red crosses.In my case the reason for this was that the GetSnapshot.exe is unable to reach the SharePoint gallery. In all these cases the Site was unreachable from within IE on the server console as well. Disabling the loopback check in SharePoint (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;896861) resolved the issue and the Snaphots are generated ok again.
I love music, i listen to it a lot on my ipod and on my computer.I also love statistics, I send all the tracks I listen to the online music service last.fm where I have stored all the tracks i have played since 2006.
This is a list of my top artists (yes I am kind of a metal head):
Wouldn’t it be great if I could load all my played tracks into the PivotViewer? This blog posts describes how I got all my played track information into the PivotViewer. In a previous blog post is described how you we can make a PivotViewer application on top of PowerPivot. Today we are going to load data from Last.FM into PowerPivot and base a PivotViewer app on top of PowerPivot.
In my previous blog post I checked what the key influencer is for having a lot of stock using PowerPivot and Predixion Insight for Excel. Now i want to see what the number of units on stock will do in the future. I want to see this by country for the next 6 months.
We start in Excel, i have again loaded the same tables as before into PowerPivot containing the Factinventory and a table containing country’s and stores. This time we are going to use PowerPivot indirect since the data in PowerPivot is not really suited for the Forecast, besides we want to use an aggregated value for this and not all individual 8 million records we used before.
Since this week the public beta of Predixion Software’s Data mining in the cloud for Excel is available. Those of you who are familiar with the the Microsoft SSAS Data mining Add-ins should be very comfortable with what is inside Predixion Data mining for Excel. I have done a previous blog post on doing data mining using PowerPivot with the MS data mining add-in where you can see how it currently works .
Predixion Insight for Excel is like a new version of the current SSAS add-in, the Predixion insight team consists of the folks that previously build the Add-in for MS and now started on their own.
The biggest change is that you no longer need an SSAS server installed. All action happens on the Predixion servers in the cloud. Second biggest (for me) is that you can use PowerPivot data as a datasource for you Data mining. Using it in combination with PowerPivot requires nothing more then Excel and a Predixion subscription for data mining. Furthermore the overal UI had been improved to make data mining a more user friendly experience. And it support 64 bits.
From the Predixion site:
Predixion’s intuitive and easy-to-use solution allows users to run predictive analytics in the familiar environments of Microsoft Excel® and PowerPivot. Whether you are an existing SQL Server® Data Mining user, a BI specialist or a newcomer to the arena of Predictive Analytics, Predixion Insight™ will enable you to easily create, manage and run powerful and accurate predictive models without extensive training or specific knowledge of the methodologies currently required to create successful predictive projects.
In this blog post we are going to see what are the key influencer are of the number of items on stock from the Contoso sample database.
Microsoft announced earlier this week that a CEP/stream processing product will be included in SQL 2008 R2. Complex Event Processing, or CEP, is primarily an event processing concept that deals with the task of processing multiple events with the goal of identifying the meaningful events within the event cloud. CEP employs techniques such as detection of complex patterns of many events, event correlation and abstraction, event hierarchies, and relationships between events such as causality, membership, and timing, and event-driven processes.
Microsoft called out four reasons to me why CEP might be needed in addition to ordinary database processing. Two are the standard reasons for data reduction:
1. Without CEP, you can’t bang the data into the database fast enough.
2. You don’t want to keep most of the data past a short time window anyway.
The other two are also fairly standard reasons for using CEP:
3. Standard SQL isn’t all that great for time series anyway.
4. CEP use cases often call for incremental processing and/or parameterization of queries, something CEP engines are commonly better designed for than are DBMS.
However, Microsoft seems to be taking a somewhat different approach to time-based SQL extensions than some other vendors. To quote email Microsoft sent today:
Microsoft Research (MSR) introduced the temporal extensions to relational algebra based upon a notion of application time that is independent of system time. It matters when the event originated instead of when they arrived at the processing system. Further it treats each event as being associated with an interval of time as opposed to a point in time. This helps in modeling certain real life phenomenon naturally. [StreamBase et al.] also reason about multiple streams. Both the approaches are extensions to relational algebra. The MSR approach took the algebra as the starting point while StreamBase took an existing language over the algebra – SQL as the starting point. The MSR approach consequently avoids having to rework other elements of the SQL surface. The primary language extensions through which this algebra will be exposed initially is LINQ.
What are the implications of this? Can we use the CEP algorithm to monitor real time data from the cloud and extract only the necessary data to our datawarehouse ? or am i going to far with this ?
Found at: http://www.dbms2.com/2009/05/13/microsoft-announced-cep-this-week-too/
