During installation of Analysis Services, most of the properties are configured with a default value. These properties can be reconfigured any time after installation from SQL Server Management Studio. For most properties the default values works just fine. However, there are few properties that are best reconfigured immediately after installation to prevent down-time when the system is in production. This post discusses the bare minimum properties that must be reconfigured after an Analysis Service Installation.

After many implementations, I have a strong inclination and preference to deploy SSIS packages to File System rather than to the Server. File System method of deployment is clean and elegant. It encourages package reusability and in some instances it’s the only feasible option. Here are two common ETL scenarios to support my view. Server deployments exist for purpose of backward compatibility with the DTS packages migrated from earlier versions of SQL Server when the concept of package config did not exist. For new SSIS development, File System Deployment is the way to go.

A common misconception among developers is that Load, Stress and Performance Testing mean the same. Well, they are not. There are subtle yet distinctive differences between each of these methods of testing, their purpose and the audience they target. I’m not a tester, so I won’t be going into the nuts and bolts of each of these methods of testing, rather I would like to present a very high level view on this subject that developers can relate to (and hopefully avoid confusion that I found myself in...).

In this post, one of the cool feature of Excel called "Convert to Formulas" is explained with a practical illustration of it's use and also a word of caution...

In this post the different methods of securing dimension data is explained and compared with an emphasis on special case scenario - the Role Playing Dimension.

SQL Server writes transaction logs sequentially. The size of transaction logs when using sql INSERT statement depends on the Recovery Model of the database. Database recovery model can be – Simple (min), Bulk-Logged (intermediate) or Full (max). While this is true for SQL INSERT statements, records inserted through an SSIS Data Flow Destination (like SQL [...]

Analysis Services security model is role based. Within a role, the cube data can be secured by either Cell data or Dimension data. In this post, I compare the relative merits of each method.

Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Test Edition is a valuable tool to load test web applications. This post is about using VSTS Test Edition to load test SharePoint Excel Services report. In particular, I explain the solution to handle session time-out issues encountered with Excel Services web test that could invalidate the load test.

Analysis Service Security model is role based and relies on Windows authentication. This could pose a challenge for development and support teams to test/troubleshoot role permissions because of sensitivities around windows password. Thankfully Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) provides a feature to test/troubleshoot role permissions and the best thing is - you don’t need to know the password of the windows account you are testing.

Page Viewer is an out-of-box SharePoint web part that functions as a placeholder for web pages, folders and files that reside usually outside the SharePoint environment. One such use of Page Viewer is to display a Reporting Service report which is not integrated with SharePoint. This means with a little bit on tinkering Page Viewer can be effectively converted into a Report Viewer.

When implementing Form Based Authentication (FBA) for SharePoint sites, ensure that your role members and role names do not have commas in them. A comma in any role member attribute or in role name, throws "Error: Access Denied" exception.

Microsoft introduced a cool feature in Excel 2007 called Offline OLAP that enables you to work with an Analysis Service Cube in disconnected mode. The Offline OLAP feature basically snapshots a version of the cube into a local cube file which can be used by Pivot Tables. In this post I explain different scenarios where offline mode may be helpful and how to get started on offline OLAP.

Have you encountered this error message when opening an Excel Service Report in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)? "You do not have permissions to open this file on Excel Services. Make sure that the file is in an Excel Services trusted location and that you have access to the file". In this post, I provide solutions to get rid of this error message.

Deploying Report Actions in Analysis Services is an extension to a popular post Reporting Action in Analysis Services on this blog . In this post, I explain the steps to deploy a report action using Analysis Services Deployment Wizard. By using the Analysis Service Deployment Wizard, Report Actions can be deployed effortlessly without hard coding the report URLS in your Analysis Services project.

This blog post is for SharePoint Dashboard Designers. Often Dashboard Designers find it annoying to discover that their web part is either too big (leaving ugly scroll bars) or too small (leaving empty space) for the web zone and they are not able to modify the dimensions of the web zone. In this post, I provide a quick solution to re-size web zones.

The use of raw files as SSIS data source is highly recommended for huge volume of data due to its superior read/write performance. Raw files store data in a very basic format that requires almost zero translation and parsing. This enables faster data reads/writes when compared to Flat Files and even faster than Database tables. The usage of raw files as SSIS data source comes with one caveat. Since the raw file format is native to the source, the raw file’s metadata must be available at design time to the package developer to build the data flow. In this post I explain a trick to workaround this caveat.

CodePlex Projects that I'm closely involved.

Analysis Service Database can be backed up from SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). This process is pretty much UI based. In this post, I explain two different techniques to automate the backup of an Analysis Service Database.

Analysis Management Objects (AMO) allows you to programmatically interact with the object model of Analysis Services. The AMO layer interacts with Analysis Services by issuing XMLA commands. In this post I will explain the steps to automate the process of securing an Analysis Service Cube by building wrappers around AMO objects.

Analysis Services allows cube browsers like Excel to fire events which are handled by the Actions defined in the cube. In this blog post, I will explain a specific type of cube action called Reporting Action. Reporting Action enables information consumers to fire a SQL Server Report when a specific condition is met while browsing the cube.