(Steve Rachui) Reporting is a crucial ability for most organizations—and the ability to provide robust reporting of various Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) functions is no exception. Reporting is a feature that hasn’t changed much over several versions of Systems Management Serv

(Buck Woody) As data professionals, most of us concentrate on establishing a secure, reliable, well-performing back-end server for various applications. We seldom worry about those front-end applications, unless they cause issues with a cluster or server.

(Marco Russo) PowerPivot for Excel is an Add-In which uses a local version of Analysis Services (SSAS) to process data and make calculation to respond to user queries made using Excel 2010. The SSAS engine is loaded in-memory in the process of Excel. Especially with a 32 bit of Excel, there are part

(K. Brian Kelley) I want to use user-definable parameters to provide filtering in my reports for SSRS, but I’m not sure how to proceed. I’m basically looking for the case where the user is able to set the value and then execute the report. For instance, I’m looking for the case where the user is abl

Much of the data that is created every day is unstructured data, such as text documents, images, and videos. This unstructured data is often stored outside the database, separate from its structured data. This separation can cause data management complexities. Or, if the data is associated with stru

(Buck Woody) I had someone ask me yesterday how they could get to a database used by a product that they owned, but that was installed using SQL Server Express. They didn’t have access to the database, and they didn’t know the password for the service that started Express, so they wanted to know if

(Marcin Policht) SQL Server platform comprises of several distinct, highly efficient components, which include Database Engine (with its Service Broker and Replication mechanisms), Analysis Services (incorporating Data Mining and Multi-dimensional Data methodologies), and Reporting Services. All of

(Merrill Aldrich) I was inspired by Aaron’s post on a similar topic a while back to dig deeper into how I could automagically adjust the memory allocation for multiple instances of SQL Server in a cluster-failover scenario. So, suppose you have: –A two-node cluster –Four SQL Server instances,

(Buck Woody) There are actually multiple ways to evaluate the performance of a SQL Server system. I’ve explained how to examine the system from a holistic point of view — starting with the various components that make up the round-trip of data from the client through the network, the middle tiers (i

(Ashish Kumar Mehta) One of the Junior DBA in my company approached me yesterday with a dilemma. He was assigned a task to restore an Analysis Service SQL Server 2008 Database on a development server. At first I started to tell him, but figured it would be smarter to document the steps which he need