Report Builder 3.0

I was out at a client in London last week providing some hands-on training on Report Builder 3.0. Its one of those tools which when we are developing things we overlook and go for the more developer intense experience provided by Visual Studio. Actually, Report Builder 3.0 is a good product, with most of the … Continue reading →

Keeping up to date

For the last year or so I have been working on a couple of large projects, one of which was part of the largest IT project in UK financial services. It was a great project and overall went very well. The  only issue is that in the last year or so and working with large … Continue reading →

SSRS Report Parameter Bug

I came across a really odd bug today in SSRS 2005. Bascially we have a report that has a combination of dependent parameters. The last parameter MDX string value is then passed into the MDX dataset as a constraint. The problem came up as the final parameter could result in the same value for 2 … Continue reading →

Get to the top of BlackBerry email

This has been annoying me for ages, I know I should RTFM, but anyway to scroll around your BlackBerry email, do the following: “T” for top, “B” for bottom, “U” for unread message, “SPACE” for page scrolldown. Simple as that.

SQL Scripts Error Handling

On my current project we are constantly improving the way we deliver new patches to our customer’s environment. A lot of the changes and fixes we apply are done via SQL Scripts or XMLA Scripts, and these are passed on to the client to run in their environment. We have encountered deployment issues in the … Continue reading →

BI Evangelism

Having worked in Business Intelligence now for over 12 years I have seen the landscape change a lot, and the technology has obviously improved. However, the underlying needs of business users hasn’t really changed; they still want simple access to their own data. There are all these conference of BI professionals attempting to impress each … Continue reading →

Excel Services

We had a recent request to combine data from 2 different cubes on 2 different Analysis Services instances on 2 different servers. You can see where I am going here. There are a few ways to do this, but what we eventually came up with was using good old Excel. We created 2 data connections … Continue reading →

Auto Refresh SSRS in SharePoint 2010

I have been working on some dashboards in SharePoint 2010 and Reporting Services 2008 R2 for a client. There are a series of Gauges and Charts all set to refresh every 60 seconds, which work fine when deployed to a Native Report Server.They also work individually when deployed into a Reports library in SharePoint integrated  … Continue reading →

DATEFIRST

I came across something odd today at work. I was trying to run some retrospective updates using a stored procedure which ran data into a fact table, but couldn’t get it to properly pick up the date I was passing in. The stored proc takes the relevant date, works out the week from the Time … Continue reading →