October 2006 - Posts

• Unicode, VARCHAR, NVARCHAR and index usage in SQL Server

  This is not the first time I found non-intuitive issues with collation, Unicode and 8-bit strings with SQL Server, but this time I discovered (more precisely: one of my customers discovered and asked me...) a strange behavior that affects the query plan Read More... Posted Saturday, October 21, 2006 12:25 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 2 Comments

• SSAS suggestions for Katmai: perspectives and drillthrough

  I just added two suggestion items to my feedback for SSAS2005. The first suggestion is about the perspectives: it would be useful to select member filters and default members on each single perspective. Another important thing could be to be able to rename Read More... Posted Thursday, October 12, 2006 7:20 PM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments

• SQL Refactor in public beta

  I am trying the beta of SQL Refactor (available here ). It is really helpful to refactor the layout of a query and I like to do this in at least three scenarios: when I read a query written by other people, when I need to modify a query in a Reporting Read More... Posted Friday, October 06, 2006 3:31 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments

• Using MSOLAP as a linked server

  I just faced the problem to connect an Analysis Services (2000 or 2005) to a SQL Server 2005 database using a OPENROWSET statement. If you face an "access denied" error (precisely, "The OLE DB provider "MSOLAP" for linked server "SERVERNAME" reported Read More... Posted Thursday, October 05, 2006 8:32 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 1 Comments

• DSV and Views: how to decouple the physical tables from UDM

  I just answered to a newsgroup question about the use of views as fact tables to populate cubes. I am a strong supporter of the need to build a star schema before to build a UDM, while I understand that in some circumstances (few data, fast prototypes) Read More... Posted Tuesday, October 03, 2006 3:41 AM by Marco Russo (SQLBI) | 0 Comments