l'Ishwar incroyable Nataraj

Have you ever noticed that your measure value in SSAS do not correspond to the value in the data warehouse.... this is a big hindrance....because one is wasting precious development time in extrapolating data between the cube and the warehouse. I am just going to create a checklist for issues to look at really quick if one does come across this issue!!! Problem Statement: Let us consider a Fact table called FactInternetSales with a fact called internetsalesamount select sum(internetsalesamount) from FactInternetSales; Let us say that this value is 25000. Now if we run this against the cube .... lets call it Sales. select measures].[internetsalesamount] on 0 from Sales; Now the value returned from this query is 510...... Why is this happening? Now just follow the following checklist to ensure that you can rectify this issue as soon as one possibly can.... 1. Go to the cube and in the [internetsalesamount] properties, change the aggregation ...

It was recently announced that Satya Nadella (a Microsoft veteran) has become the CEO of Microsoft. Even though I have a great sense of pride that a person of Indian origins or a first generation American immigrant of Indian origins is now the biggest and probably the most powerful person in the I.T. industry today, Microsoft placed a safe bet in naming Nadella as its CEO. I feel that a better choice would have been Sundar Pichai (VP @ Google) or even Robin Li ( The founder and CEO of Baidu). Of course from an experience point of view Nadella would need absolutely no introduction. His resume speaks for itself. He created and successfully handled a multitude of Microsoft's unique silo's or divisions. But infusing new ideas decoupled from the earlier thought process that Microsoft has always had would have paved for a new era when it comes to Microsoft revolutionizing the tech industry. This is a factor that will bear a brunt in Microsoft's cogs because clearly Nadella has b...

Just a follow on to the earlier post..... try { string file = Dts.Variables["strLocalDirectory"].Value.ToString() + "\\" + Dts.Variables["strLocalFile"].Value.ToString(); string username = Dts.Variables["strFTPUserName"].Value.ToString(); string password = Dts.Variables["strFTPPassword"].Value.ToString(); // Setup session options SessionOptions sessionOptions = new SessionOptions { HostName = Dts.Variables["strFTPHost"].Value.ToString(), UserName = username, Password = password, Protocol = Protocol.Sftp, PortNumber = int.Parse(Dts.Variables["strFTPPort"].Value.ToString()), FtpMode = FtpMode.Active, FtpSecure = FtpSecure.None, SshHostKeyFin...

The following scripttask showcases both the FTP and FTPS based connections for uploading a file (it can be modified to perform more options). My earlier approach was to leverage the FTPWebRequest but the "AUTH SSL" command was taking a huge amount of time so decided to fall back on using WinSCP instead. Also ensure that the WinSCP.exe is added to the path environment variable and the WinSCP.dll is placed in the GAC. public partial class ScriptMain : Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Tasks.ScriptTask.VSTARTScriptObjectModelBase { public void Main() { /* * Traditional FTP */ /*ConnectionManager mgr = Dts.Connections.Add("FTP"); try { mgr.Properties["ServerName"].SetValue(mgr, "ftp://"+Dts.Variables["strFTPHost"].Value.ToString()); mgr.Properties["ServerUserName"].SetValue(mgr, Dts.Variables["strFTPUserName"].Value.ToString()); ...

Using Rhino-ETL ( a C# based) framework for developing standard ETL's is pretty easy and one can do a lot of fun stuff with the underlying source data. I just wrote up a quick console app to generate data into a text file and push the same data into a table in SQL Server as well as an external file. Here are the following steps (for the external file push): 1. Create a new C# console application solution in Visual Studio. 2. Target the .Net framework as shown in the below screen shot in your project properties:- 3. Create 3 Sub Folders underneath your project as shown in the following screen shot DataObjects --> Contains the class files associated with each and every table/file in your environment. Example:- if your source file contains student data, then you would create a class file called Student with the individual properties (in relation to the properties) exposed (nouns). Operations --> This primarily contains the class files that contain the activities (a...

Recently got back into active web application development after quite a long time (4-5 years)..... It is always fun working on the UI layer except for the fact that everyone has their own opinions when it comes to look and feel. Anyways this article is to stress some of the javascript libraries that I am currently evaluating and trying to leverage for a new website.... 1. Backbone.js--> I just loved using this library, easy construction of Models - Backbone.Model.extend({ Model definition }) and views - Backbone.View.extend({view declaration}). It seems to not adhere to any specific pattern. A lot of sites claim this to be a traditional MVC structure but I disagree because of the fact that this library can cater to other popular patterns out there in the market today. I have decided to settle down on this for my web site just because of the code base and the ease of use of writing backbone. It supports RESTful based routing as well.... so overall just one word for it awesome... A...

In the recent past, I have been working as a scrum master for one of the projects. And since there were two folds to this project, a portion being handled onsite as well as a portion being handled offshore, there were initial hiccups that gradually deteriorated away. But here comes the crux of the problem and where an Agile process has to be evaluated.         We had weekly sprints where a subset of tasks were to be completed and we have a daily scrum between the offshore and onsite team. But the onsite team were persistent on a daily mail sent with the changes being addressed. Now the point of the scrum is to take into account who, what and where the changes have to be made based on the product backlog. Now having status mails as part of the Agile process is indeed a flaw in the fundamental flow. After pointing out this fact, I was counter attacked with several points (some of which were valid to have a status update email) and finally left to ...

Been following the recent political scenario in the U.S for the past couple of weeks. Obama's re-election as the most powerful man on the planet does have a lot of impact across various industries. Kudos to Romney for giving a great fight. There were a couple of aspects related to Romney's foreign policies that I personally did not like but overall the man would have made a good president. Obama was definitely my pick to win the presidential elections and take things over for a second term. I just hope he does not get blocked while promoting his various plans to rebuild the U.S. The only problem is that he cannot start afresh, he has to ensure that the policies that had created such a massive fiscal deficit in U.S history is keenly looked into and changes be made to promote more growth especially in sectors that had taken the brunt of the beating while the republicans were at the helm. In the software industry barring innovation, it is important that skilled experti...

Man O man!!!! I have recently started playing around with Office 2013 and I love it. It has a lot more facets that make regular excel user's lives easier. But this post is about an issue of using PowerPivot in Excel 2013. I started opening existing PowerPivot workbooks (created in Excel 2010) in Excel 2013 and whenever I navigated to the PowerPivot ribbon, all the options were always disabled. I thought for a second that there might have been a problem with the installation and I might have missed an option while installing Office 2013. But then barring the fact that Visio 2013 is still a seperate installation, there was  absolutely no problem with my Office 2013 installation. Then I tried reopening the workbooks in Excel 2010 to just verify that these were not corrupted in any fashion and thank the gods above!!! they weren't. So that got me thinking that the consumer preview of Office 2013 might not have PowerPivot enabled. Was just about to ping someone in the Office team wh...

Metro style apps in Win 8 is going to become a big hit especially with the developer community and especially with Microsoft promoting these apps in a major way through its Windows store....only good things are in store for most of us. Metro apps basically works seamlessly on top of the following languages which MS is trying to revolve the developer community with. Those languages are C#/VB, C/C++ and Javascript. The structure of  metro apps is in the following fashion: If we were to design an website to perform some sort of task such as displaying information from a database. The HTML and CSS page can be developed with any sort any editor (prefer Visual Studio 2012 to display the info.... or even Blend). But once the page is developed you will have to explicitly define function calls to the WIN RT layer which provides a host of API's to seamlessly integrate the application with the OS. Somewhat of a framework on top of a framework. The next aspect is about the projections th...

Has anyone ever come up with the of duplication of KPI related information after dragging and dropping two seperate KPI's within a scorecard......... well! I have. Now the issue is quite simple, I define two separate KPI's called KPI1 and KPI2. I define KPI1 in the following manner: After this step I define KPI2 in the following manner: Once I perform the following operations I basically define a scorecard dropping a dimension (eg: Brand) for this purpose and then drag KPI1 and then KPI2 ( Note:  KPI2 is the sibling of KPI1). The scorecard gets generated in the following fashion: Now if you notice the scorecard the Actual and Target is repeated for KPI2 even though KPI2 has the names defined as Test1 and Test2 respectively and the default values for KPI2 is empty for all rows of the slicing dimension. This issue is due to the fact that PPS did not recognize KPI2 as a valid sibling of KPI1 (This is indeed an issue with PPS and needs to be changed as soon as possible ...

Recently was discussing with a colleague of mine as to the best practices in SQL. So this post is dedicated to that chat. The first thing we discussed about is the usage of NOLOCK's for tables in non highly transactional based databases with a wide user audience. Now the question of dirty reads does come to mind but at the end of the day the Read Uncommited transaction allows multiple end users to query the underlying table. NOLOCK is nothing more than a table hint that allows the query to be performed in a read uncommited fashion but is still a great practice to follow even while creating views. I have been using NOLOCK's for a large period of time (and sometimes implement it out of habit for my views i.e. SELECT C1,C2 FROM V1 (NOLOCK) as well which does not make any sense but is more of a force of habit except for my last post where I removed it on purpose) but I recently came across another table hint called READPAST but I am strictly avoiding this topic as this prevents ...

It is really important for a handshake model to exist between most upstream and downstream systems. Normally there is a mode of communication between the upstream Dev and Downstream Dev teams in order to track these changes. Now I have created a simple framework. Now rather than a pull system where the downstream pulls the meta data changes from the source, I have created a push system that the upstream will send across to the destination systems. Let us see how the framework works: Step 1: Create a table that will store the metadata changes like addition or updation of tables and views as follows- --Table to store Metadata changes for views and tables CREATE TABLE DB_Table_View_Changes ( DB_Table_View_Changes_ID INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY ,DB_Schema_Name VARCHAR(256) ,DB_TableView_Name VARCHAR(256) ,DB_TableView_Type VARCHAR(5) ,ModifiedDate DATETIME ) Step 2: The next step is to create the table that will track the Column changes made to views or tables- --Table to t...

If you have a good sense of imagination then you are in for a treat....memorizing words is extremely easy if you put it into a story... Let me take you through a list of 20 words that I had to memorize and it has been fifteen days since I saw the list and I still remember the words... The underlined words in the following paragraph indicates the words that I had to memorize: I took a pen and then took a cauliflower and scribbled the word wine on it. To dot the i in the word wine I jammed my key into the cauliflower. After this I took the cauliflower with me and went to a big dark auditorium where I was carrying a torch . I went on the stage and then I made a wish into the microphone present there for a tent . The tent that appeared had a massive needle through it. I touched the needle with my finger which had a massive diamond studded ring . After which I opened the tent and saw a massive massaging chair with a coffee filled glass in it and a sieve on top of it. A te...

The key aspects of any data visualization tool is to focus on your customer's needs. Now you can classify  (or rollup) your customers into three groups. Business Group : The business group are the folks who deal with viewing data and performing calculations based on their needs and requirements. This group may not have extremely strong technical skills. The key performance oriented concept for this group is to view data in different formats and maybe change the appearance of their reports  while showcasing the same to their target audience. Technical Group: The technical group primarily contain members who not only view data but are also able to work with the tools used to fetch and visualize the data. This group of people need an extremely small amount of handholding once their dashboarding needs are satisfied. Management Group: The management group comprises of the C level exec's, VP's and high level officials who just need to view data and understand the current trend...

While discussing about PPS today, I kind of explained that PPS will not support multiple datasources on the same dashboard. Now this is true to a great extent but KPI's for that matter is a totally different story. KPI's can be created with multiple datasource and displayed within a PPS scorecard. Maybe my mind was not in place while explaining PPS. This is indeed understandable when working on multiple platforms. A dashboard can be created with scorecards based on KPI's from different data sources. Also on a quick note if the platforms that support office and Sharepoint differ i.e. SharePoint on a X64 related platform and the office installed is x86 then importing data from the excel source into a PPS dashboard will result in a cross platform error. The resolution for this is to reinstall office for x64 m/c. 05/10/2012(Value Add for the comments above) No wait found an even better solution --> checked out this gentleman's post and it worked like a charm--> Sol...

Oh Oh (Jaane Jaana the song just came to my mind)..... Installing powerview on Sharepoint 2010 with SQL server 2012 turned out to be a nightmare. Since I was doing the install on my local m/c, things became more harder than usual as I do not have enough memory to scatter around. So let me explain the steps I went through and the effort I had to exert in playing around with PowerView.       I had SQL Server 2008 R2 installed with Sharepoint 2010 on my machine. Just for folks out there who do not want to uninstall their current SQL server version and especially if it is 2008, ensure that you install SQL Server 2008 SP2 before installing SQL Server 2012 (I am going to refer to it with the term "Denali" from this point on). If you do not install SP1 and SP2 prior to the Denali install you are in for one heck of a ride. Mark my words please do the installs prior to installing Denali. If you do install Denali without upgrading SQL server 2008 to SP2, ensure th...

Recently saw Microsoft's annual townhall speech in Washington DC. The spotlight was on the CEO Steve Ballmer and he basically took the ball to the end zone and scored a touchdown with this speech of his. The biggest aspect of his speech was the enthusiasm he showed to the crowd and it was impressive to say the least. He was as exuberant and passionate with his speech as ever. It just goes to show the difference between go getter's who truly are passionate about what they do and people who prefer mediocrity. Seriously if I were as passionate about my job as Mr. Ballmer, I would be someplace else. The speech of his just shows to the people at Microsoft how much involved he is with every single product that Microsoft is working with and his commitment to ensure that these products become number 1 in the global markets. The energy shown throughout the speech was electrifying. This man seemed to have all engines fired up for this speech like the perrenial race horse with the carrot...

SSRS report is failing while selecting the All parameter Now let me begin by giving a case statement whereby I have added 'ALL' to my SSRS report parameters dropdown. But whenever I select the ALL option I run into the out of memory exception because the report is executing in a never ending loop. Here are samples of the issue @ hand and how I went about fixing the same For example==> Let me say that I have a Country dropdown for the following SSRS report (using Adventureworks). The SSRS dataset Report Query is as follows: SELECT adr.AddressLine1, adr.AddressLine2, adr.PostalCode, adr.City, sp.Name, cr.Name AS Country FROM Person.Address AS adr INNER JOIN Person.StateProvince AS sp ON adr.StateProvinceID = sp.StateProvinceID INNER JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS cr ON sp.CountryRegionCode = cr.CountryRegionCode and (cr.CountryRegionCode = @country) As you notice the parameter I am using is @country. The @country parameter is populated initially by using the following q...

This is the most irritating warning message in my C# coding experience. I have been using the AppSetting regardless of this warning message, but was recently told that even though the code compilation occurs in a similar manner, it is a burden to the C# compiler for this particular line and just for people to understand the warning again.... this is the crappy message 1 more time: 'System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings' is obsolete: 'This method is obsolete, it has been replaced by System.Configuration!System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings' Now why the heck does the System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager not exist!!!! This is becoz it is not referring to the correct DLL reference (The 1 in GAC is incorrect arrgh!!!!) and 1 needs to explicitly add the correct instance of the DLL (Add Reference --> System.Configuration with the correct version). Why do you need to add this explicitly and why doesn't Microsoft Visual Studio te...