BI-Curious

MSDN Events: Get cloud ready with Windows Azure

Pierre LaFromboise — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:44:33 +0000

The Microsoft ISV Developer Evangelist Team blog recently announced a free all-day training event covering Windows Azure: In response to overwhelming feedback, we’ve organized a special, all-day FREE Windows Azure Firestarter event April 6, 2010, 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM (PT) at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington to help developers learn more about how [...]

Friday Bullets

Pierre LaFromboise — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 04:02:45 +0000

Most of my attention this week was occupied with following Mix 2010. So, it shouldn’t be much surprise that a lot of these bullets stem from that. BIDS Integration Story in R2 – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly “There was a huge discussion thread about the BIDS-Visual Studio integration story in the SQL [...]

3 Screens, the Cloud, and Business Intelligence? – Part 2

Pierre LaFromboise — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:52:59 +0000

Traditionally, as stated in the previous post, when Microsoft is referring to the three-screen concept they are talking about PC, mobile, and TV. The actual devices behind each of these can vary. In fact I would go so far to say that the devices themselves are not the important component. How a user interacts with [...]

3 Screens, the Cloud, and Business Intelligence? – Part 1

Pierre LaFromboise — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:33:01 +0000

Microsoft has been touting their technology vision of three-screens and the cloud for about a year now (much longer if you don’t include the formal name). For those not familiar with the concept it is essentially a vision that embraces the union of technologies across the PC, mobile, and TV. The common connector in this [...]

Friday Bullets

Pierre LaFromboise — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:52:23 +0000

Lately, I have been busier than not. Normally this is a good thing but it has resulted in me neglecting this blog more than I would like. I have several topics in the works but the free time just hasn’t been available to wrap them up. So, in the meantime, I’d like to start a [...]

ETL Pattern: Staged Refresh

Pierre LaFromboise — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:16:00 +0000

Here is a fairly common challenge: perform a complete refresh of the data in a target table. It seems pretty basic and easy. All of the existing data is replaced with the new load. There is no change detection required; just a simple load. Yet, more often than not, when I go into a client [...]

Looking To Learn PowerShell?

Pierre LaFromboise — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:21:33 +0000

Microsoft recently released an updated version of the PowerShell Quick Reference Guide. Essentially, it is a printable booklet that has an overview of commonly used PowerShell commands. So, if you’re learning PowerShell or just need a helpful reminder, check it out. By the way, I cannot stress enough how useful PowerShell can be when working [...]

BI Style Guides

Pierre LaFromboise — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:20:27 +0000

While catching up on blog posts I came across a post by Patrick Husting from last month. The post titled “Better looking charts in Excel 2007/2010” provides a before and after example of a chart in Excel. The simple example is meant to show the importance of adding a little style to your reports. I [...]

SQL Server 2008 R2 Official Release Date

Pierre LaFromboise — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:34:53 +0000

Just a heads up for those who didn’t notice: yesterday Microsoft released the official release date for the next version of SQL Server. It will be generally available May 2010 and should appear on the May pricelist. I have been looking forward to some of the improvements in the upcoming release and am particularly excited about [...]

T-SQL Snippet: Strip Time from Datetime

Pierre LaFromboise — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:49:22 +0000

I would have thought that this would be fairly common knowledge but I am often asked for a quick example of how to strip off the time element of a SQL datetime type. So, here is an example followed by an explanation of how and why it works: SELECT DATEADD(d,DATEDIFF(d,0,GETDATE()),0) Technically, this doesn’t strip the [...]