Recently I have seen a long demo of BonaVista Dimensions. It is a product that is able to create reports and, most important dashboards. You can use it also without SQL Server and Analysis Services, just by importing data in a local cube file that you can model using its own simple to use user interface. But what is interesting to me (in this ...

Microsoft recently announced a new roadmap for its BI architecture. The next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Denali”, is going to introduce a new semantic model named BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model). Analysis Services will host it and it will be queryable through MDX and DAX. DAX has been introduced in PowerPivot as an expression ...

Often end users use Excel to navigate into the cube. Then they may ask you to produce a report using the same data. It would be useful to get the MDX query used by Excel. Moreover, Excel 2007 offers a good MDX quality of the produced query against Analysis Services 2005 (much better than Excel 2003). I don't know why Excel doesn't have such a ...