Tag Archives: SSAS

SQL Server Analysis Services Operations Guide Every Business Intelligence Developer Needs!

Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services is an industrial strength OLAP engine that is fast and scalable.  With CALUMO it is easy to use too!

I believe it’s important to understand your OLAP engine so you can properly control it when you need to.  This document gives you that power. The document describes what’s under the hood so you can fix… Continue reading

Just how easy is it to create a nice looking report with CALUMO?

A few people have asked me recently, “Just how easy is it to create a nice looking report with CALUMO and make it work as a web page?”

The best way to show you how build a web report using Excel is with a video.

http://youtu.be/s4vOX2vsz-0

Remember, this report has… Continue reading

Double-Hop: The Kerberos Nightmare

BEWARE: Here there be dragons!

In the world of Microsoft BI, one of the more painful configuration tasks is to get double-hop authentication working so that you can run SQL Server Analysis Services on a separate machine to your application/web server.

There is a very detailed article from Microsoft on what you need to do and how to configure your environment to allow for double-hop authentication… Continue reading

Super FAST cubes with CALUMO

I was talking Paul Cavanagh-Downs, one of CALUMO’s awesome consulting team today.  He showed me a web based CALUMO report he built in CALUMO that took about 1 second to display aggregated data.  Paul changed the date, and some of the other 11 hierarchy members and the report still displayed in 1 second but with new data this time.

I say “Yeah, that’s pretty good.  It looks nice too.”… Continue reading

Analysis Services – Vision & Roadmap Update from Microsoft

Look out world! Microsoft has finally given a pretty good roadmap for the next major release of SQL Server “Denali”.

SQL Server “Denali” looks pretty interesting with a new thing called the BI Semantic Model. On the face of it, Microsoft has a very compelling Business Intelligence offering that truly unifies Relation data with Multidimensional (tables and cubes). What does that mean? Hopefully one query, one business question… Continue reading

BI In Education – University of NSW

First of trilogy of End User case studies, here is a short and potted history of deiverables at University of NSW.

CALUMO was invited by UNSW to assist them in reducing overheads and costs of their budgeting and reporting system.

Utilizing their existing technology and adding the CALUMO application layer, UNSW was able to provide effective management reporting across the University as well as a budget interface for… Continue reading

BI in Education – University of Canberra

Third in a trilogy of End User stories in Education, here is a short history of Business Intelligence in action at University of Canberra.

With a multitude of spreadsheets and endless hours required to produce budgets and management reporting, University of Canberra went to market looking for a solution.

In a competitive process, CALUMO was selected to deliver management reporting, budgeting and forecasting.  Once the University saw the… Continue reading

Dynamic Security in SQL Server Analysis Services

I was talking to Steven Gibbs from UNSW the other day and he told me how he improved query time for users from a cold cache by a factor of 10. UNSW redesigned some cubes so they can use attribute hierarchies (moving away from parent child hierarchies). Everything is running smoothly until he came to incorporate dynamic security.  As Steve told me “it all goes pear-shaped”.

To understand the issue… Continue reading

Why the National Trust use CALUMO for Reporting, Budgeting and Forecasting

Will Holmes À Court, CEO of National Trust of Australia (NSW), a not for profit (or loss) organisation presented how they use CALUMO for Business Intelligence at the last Club CALUMO User Group.

Will showed the group many reports consolidating data from various underlying systems as well as budget & forecast templates he and his finance team created for data acquisition from the field. The reports and input templates… Continue reading

Rocking the Budget in Education with CALUMO and Analysis Services at UNSW

A couple of weeks ago, Alister Cairns from University of New South Wales came to Club CALUMO, CALUMO’s user group and presented what he and his team had rolled out to his constituents for reporting, budgeting and forecasting with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) at UNSW.  The primary tool is Excel with CALUMO’s integration for write back to SSAS.

UNSW have been using CALUMO for over 3 years.  They… Continue reading