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23 hours ago
Another SQLBits – the fifth! – has come and gone, and I wanted to say thanks to everyone that helped to make it such a success. It was a three-day event for the first time this time, which meant that there was even more organisation work needed, but looking back I think it all went extremely smoothly and was by far the slickest conference we’ve put on so far. My colleagues on the organising committee, Simon Sabin, Martin Bell, Allan Mitchell, Darren Green and James Rowland-Jones, are a great bunch of people and it’s always a pleasure to work with them on SQLBits even if it does take a big chunk out of our spare time. Thanks are also due to the speakers and sponsors, without whom the event would not be possible, and I’d also like to highlight the people who volunteered to help out doing unglamorous things like stuffing the attendee bags and room monitoring – Rachel Clements, Jon Reade, Gary Short, Rachel Hawley, Richard Douglas, Luke ...
8 days ago
Interesting news from PDC: Microsoft has announced two new services – Pinpoint and Dallas. You can find Pinpoint here: http://pinpoint.microsoft.com Here’s the blurb from the site: Pinpoint is the fast, easy way for business customers to find experts, applications, and professional services to meet their specific business needs—and build on the software they already have. At the same time, Pinpoint helps developers and technology service providers quickly and easily get software applications and professional services to market—and engage customers who need what they offer. Pinpoint is the largest directory of qualified IT companies and their software solutions built on Microsoft technologies. More than 7,000 software application offerings. More than 30,000 Microsoft-technology experts. The largest, most diverse set of Microsoft business platform offerings in the industry in a central location. Direct links between applications and the services that ...
12 days ago
At long last, the SQLBits agenda has been published: http://www.sqlbits.com/information/newagenda.aspx It’s not too late to register, even though SQLBits is only next week. It’s looking like it will be the largest event yet in terms of attendance… If you’re coming and you see me around, say hello! UPDATE: car sharing is live now too - http://sqlbits.com/CarSharing.aspx
14 days ago
Here’s something that I suspect a few people out there will be surprised I didn’t know – but as far as I’m concerned, if I didn’t know it then it’s worth blogging about. Anyway, it regards ragged hierarchies, the HideMemberIf property and the MDX Compatibility connection string property. Now you probably know that if you want to turn a user hierarchy into a ragged hierarchy (perhaps to avoid using a parent child hierarchy) you need to use the HideMemberIf property on the user hierarchy. For example, imagine you were using the following SQL query as the basis of your customer dimension: SELECT 'UK' AS Country, 'Bucks' AS State, 'Amersham' AS City, 'Chris Webb' AS Customer UNION ALL SELECT 'Italy' AS Country, 'BI' AS State, 'Biella' AS City, 'Alberto Ferrari' AS customer UNION ALL SELECT 'Vatican' AS Country, 'Vatican' AS State, 'Vatican' AS City, 'The Pope' AS customer We could build a dimension off this with attributes for Country, State, City and Customer, ...
16 days ago
The PASS Summit is over for another year and I’m just starting out on the long trip back home, so there’s plenty of time to get my thoughts together on what’s happened over the past week. In fact there’s not much to say about the event itself: it was, as ever, a lot of fun and totally worthwhile. Hey, within 30 minutes of arriving at the conference I learned I’d won an award for the best BI-related blog entry, for my post on implementing real SSAS drilldown in SSRS! Attendance was up from last year although probably the recession still took its toll: remember that there was no BI Conference this year and I would have thought that a lot of people who would have gone to it would have gone to PASS instead. To be honest I think not having a BI Conference is a good thing, actually. I don’t like having to choose which conference to attend, and part of the benefit of a conference is to get as many members of a tech community together in one place. And this was certainly the largest ...
