Oklahoma City SQL Server Developers Group

There's been talk in recent years of getting an Oklahoma City SQL Server Developers user group started in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. If you live in the area and are interested in more information about the group, please, e-mail sqlokc at gmail dot com. I'm working with some others to get this group started.

ProClarity Dashboard 6.2 and Firefox, Cube could not be found error

I've still got users that are quite happy using either ProClarity Desktop Professional or ProClarity Dashboard Server 6.2 as their reporting tool for SSAS 2005 cubes. For those still using ProClarity Desktop and ProClarity Dashboard as reporting tools, I thought I'd post a few things that I've learned over the past few months.

One item I learned, is that ProClarity Dashboard 6.2 does not work with some if not all versions of Firefox.

I was on the phone with a user who was getting the below message in their web browser:

"The selected page could not be opened because the cube could not be found. Please choose a different page."

The error message suggested that the cube was either not available to anyone or that the user's security was not setup properly. Thus, I checked both the user's cube and ProClarity Dashboard security. The user's security appeared to be setup properly in both cases.

I then checked the ProClarity Event Log on the server holding the ProClarity Dashboard. There was an error with a description like the one below:

"Information. Accessing page NameOfPage ....
from book NameOfBook ..."

Since, the Dashboard page was accessible to others, this message wasn't, especially, useful.

After all this research, I went down to the user's pod to see how she was accessing the ProClarity Dashboard and saw that she was using Firefox. I had her switch to IE, and then the ProClarity Dashboard started working for her.

I have been unable to find official documentation as to whether or not Firefox is supported with ProClarity Dashboard Server 6.2, however, from my experience Firefox does not work well with this product.

FYI...There are a variety of other possible causes for a "Cube could not be found" error in the ProClarity Dashboard. Many are documented at the ProClarity Team Blog.

Microsoft Acquires DatAllegro

The big buzz right now in BI seems to be Microsoft's announcement yesterday of a deal to purchase data warehouse appliance vendor DatAllegro. There are tons of blog posts and articles out there. So here's a quick summary and then a link.

According to Doug Henschen's artcle, Microsoft claims that "the DatAllegro acquisition will accelerate our data warehousing roadmap and quickly take us into high-scale deployments in the hundreds of terabytes."

Doug Henschen has a good article here explaining both the aquisition and the MPP architecture that DatAllegro expoits.

So, if your company is using SQL Server and starting to reach the 10's of terabytes of data, this may interest you.

SQL Server 2008 Launches

Launches for SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and Windows Server 2008 have started around the nation. They will be going on for the next several months.

There are two kinds of launches.

Microsoft hosted launches: http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/register/default.mspx
Community hosted launches: http://www.heroescommunitylaunch.com/

Hopefully, those in the US can find a launch in their area.

I'll be at the launch hosted by the Oklahoma City Developers Group on April 7, 2008. I am currently President of the OKCDG. As of right now, registration is open at http://heroes.okcpro.net. I'll be there, along with my fiancé, and several others from surrounding areas. We would love to have you come.

Nigel Pendse's BI Survey 7

Interesting post by Chris Webb discussing his summary of Nigel Pendse's BI Survey 7. If you're interested in knowing how well SSAS is being selected as an OLAP tool for not only SQL Server data sources but also Oracle, Sybase, and other database vendors, I highly recommend this article.

http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!7B84B0F2C239489A!1589.entry

The 404 page document survey is available for purchase at http://www.bi-survey.com/

Free ProClarity Training

For those using ProClarity, there is now free on-line training available at the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/bi/products/proclarity/proclarity-training.aspx

ProClarity Analytics Server and Authoring
Professional End User Client I
Professional End User Client II
Web Standard Client End User
Integrating ProClarity Analytics into a SharePoint Portal
Creating and Managing Business Logic with ProClarity
ProClarity Dashboard Administrator
ProClarity Dashboard End User

BIDSHelper 1.2 Release is Out

Recently BIDSHelper 1.2 was released. I just now had a chance to find out and download it. You can download it here.

I found out about BIDSHelper from Chris Webb's blog several months ago and have found it to be very, very useful. I use the Deploy MDX, Edit Aggregations, and Visualize Attribute Lattice functionality quite a bit. For those not familiar with it, I've met several people who aren't, it's a community project BIDS Add-In. Even more, Katmai appears to have some functionality similiar to some of the features found in BIDSHelper.