Davy's Blog

Recently someone asked me to check a Reporting Services report that always resulted in an Unexpected Error. The report server was configured for Sharepoint Integrated Mode.

I came to the conclusion that the server always returned this error after exactly 2 minutes, so it had to be a timeout exception.
The report was kind of big, so [...]

Microsoft has made the sessions presented on SQL Server Day 2009 available on Chopsticks

Opening Keynote by Wesley Backelant and Ritchie Houtmeyers
Best Practices for SQL Server Consolidation by Tom Van Mulders
Breaking the ETL world record with Integration Services by Henk van der Valk
Designing Effective Aggregations in Analysyis Services 2008 by Chris Webb
High availability for BI DWH [...]

I recently struggled with the following challenge in Analysis Services:
In one of the fact tables there was a field duration which actually was a duration of a certain status in seconds. I needed to display this in a readable format, like “2 days 22:15:59″.

bing brought me to the following great article, where Mosha explains how [...]

After installing SQL Server Integration Services on an existing 64-bit SQL Server, I was unable to connect to SSIS using Management Studio.
The database engine and Analysis Services was already installed on this server. I added the SSIS service without Service Pack and applied SP3 afterwards. When trying to connect, Management Studio returned the following error [...]

Today I wanted to start playing around with the new Report Manager of SQL 2008 R2.
After installing and configuring R2, I opened Internet Explorer and entered the URL of the Report Manager. In my case: http://localhost/reports_r2
I got a very empty Report Manager :

Okay, something is wrong. I tried to connect to http://localhost/reportserver_r2 :

No [...]

After deploying an Excel file to Excel Services on a new MOSS Server I got the following error:
Data Refresh Failed: Unable to retrieve external data for the following connections:
<<connection>>
The data sources may be unreachable, may not be responding, or may have denied you access.
Verify that data refresh is enabled for the trusted file location [...]

Excel 2007 is great tool for browsing OLAP cubes. But 1 thing a lot of people don’t know about or at least don’t use enough, is Member Properties.
When they want to add a property of a specific attribute, they just check this item in the field list. By using it this way, you’re kind of [...]

Session 1: what’s new in SSIS 2008 by Nico Verheire
A word about our speaker:Nico Verheire is a Business Intelligence Consultant for RealDolmen. For the last 4 years, he has been working almost exclusively on SQL Server (7, 2000, 2005), with a strong focus on SSIS, SSAS and SSRS. Nico currently holds an MCTS certification for [...]

I justed wanted to share this interesting article:
With new compression, partitioning and star schema optimization features,Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 is catching up with the state of the industry in data warehousing.Here’s why these three capabilities are crucial for scalability and performance on any platform.
By Warren Thornthwaite

Read the full article here.

Today I got this error while trying to browse a cube from the Business Intelligence Development Studio:

The detailed error information told me that the connection failed, because the server actively refused it. Connecting from another pc worked perfectly, so it had to be a problem with my computer.
To solve this problem I needed to reinstall the [...]