How to determine the room you have left in a record to store more column data.

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BI Architect Bill Pearson continues an extended examination of parameterization within Analysis Services reports. In this, Part 3 of the article, we continue to get hands-on practice creating a parameter within the graphical user interface, and then examine the construction that Reporting Services 2005/ 2008 / 2008 R2 performs behind the scenes.

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Effective data presentation techniques help users  interpret information quickly and reliably.  Layout, formatting, sizing, labeling, and other report elements may all be used to facilitate analysis and decision-making.  This article will focus on one aspect of formatting:  color.  More than just an aesthetic concern, color serves a valuable purpose to enhance perception and understanding of data.

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If you ever see the warning message “This field is missing from the returned result set form the data source” and get unexplained #Errors in columns on your report it may be from SSAS not returning a column is the column is null for all the rows. You can use the IsMissing method of the field object and a vb function in your report to work around this problem.

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PowerPivot and DAX are a powerful technologies, but there is still a good amount of work that can be done with traditional cube functions. In its current version, PowerPivot lacks the concept of dimension hierarchies; however very customized Excel reports that leverage cube hierarchies can still be built using MDX enabled cube functions. This approach goes beyond the limiting nature of traditional pivot tables by enabling power users to transverse dimensions using custom formulas that are a mix of MDX with traditional Excel functionality.

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Join BI Architect Bill Pearson as he introduces Attribute Discretization into his extended examination of the dimensional model within the integrated Microsoft Business Intelligence solution.

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Business Intelligence Architect Bill Pearson launches a new subseries surrounding components of the SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 / 2008 R2 dimensional model. In this two-part article, we introduce dimensions, and then focus upon property settings for Database Dimensions.

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If you encounter the error “Could not find the Database Engine startup handle” when attempting to install SQL Server 2008 R2, the cause may not lie with SQL Server, but with WinZip. This document describes issues I encountered in attempts to install SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows 7 machine, and my conclusion that the issue lay with flawed setup files, as extracted from the downloaded SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer .iso file by the WinZip extraction utility.

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Ralph Kimball proposed a navigation bridge table circa 1998 to assist in the tra veral of hierarchies. The intention is to make it easy to traverse hierarchies and do sums  and grouping using easy SQL. This article contains a small script which allows you to easily implement and test such a bridge table.

Updated to fix a bug in original version

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The purpose of this document is to provide some “best practices” guidance for designers and architects ODSs and Data Warehouses . This document will grow over time as we add your ideas and comments. A basic requirement for this ODS/Data Warehouse is that we expect to include data from other sources/applications and companies. We do not know currently who they are or what their requirements will be. We do know that their data types may not match our source systems, and that we should be able to tag each row with the source system which contributed the data.

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