By Thomas Bolt on 11/9/2007 2:55 PM

While implementing dynamic dimension data security in Analysis Services 2005 I ran into a problem with linking members of a set into another hierarchy. My problem was that I needed a set of members from a specific hierarchy "A" to specify the allowed member set of the dimension hierarchy "A". Unfortunately it wasn't possible to get the members from the hierarchy "A". It was only possible to get them from another hierarchy "B" of the same dimension.

As you possibly know, there is a nice MDX function LinkMember, which can be used to do exactly this kind of conversion between hierarchies. Sadly, you can only link one member, but not a whole set of members.

I've searched a long time to find a solution for this problem, but couldn't find something. As far as I know, there is no possibility to do this in MDX, so I wrote my own LinkSet function in a .NET assembly. The following code-listing shows how I did that. I know there is possibly a better and more flexible solution, but it works for my requirements ... Read More »

By Thomas Bolt (Host) on 11/6/2007 6:42 PM

If you want do design a SharePoint 2007 Services or Server Site which uses Forms Login with Office SharePoint Designer, it is important to save the authentication cookie on the client. This is required by SharePoint Designer, because it uses pass-through authentication, which doesn't work if you have forms authentication enabled on your site. By selecting "Login automatically" at the sites login screen, your credentials get stored in an authentication cookie, which then is used by SharePoint designer.

If you use Internet Explorer 7 on your machine and your site is only reachable over the internet, you will run into an authentication problem even if you have selected "Login automatically". The reason for this lies in the trusting-mechanism of IE7. As said before, the site is reachable over the internet. Therefore it isn't a trusted site per default, and the creation of an authentication cookie isn't allowed. So the only thing you have to do is to add it to your trusted sites in the internet options dial ... Read More »

By Thomas Bolt (Host) on 10/7/2007 8:37 PM

Today I read a blog entry about a new photo viewer tool from Microsoft Live Labs - Microsoft PhotoSynth. This tool allows to put-in a lot of photos from the same place (e.g. the Marcus place of venecia). PhotoSynth then aligns them in a three dimensional space, and allows to browse the pictures in this space.
I know this sounds a little bit strange, but my personal impression is, that it looks very phantastic. Take a look for your own and download the tech preview: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Technorati-Tags: Tools , Image , PhotoSynth , 3D , Photo

By Thomas Bolt (Host) on 10/5/2007 10:58 AM

While modeling a data warehouse with an Analysis Services OLAP cube for a customer I ran into a problem with a "special" fact table. The customer wanted to do the following tasks with his cost controlling system:

1. Forecasting fulltime equivalents, head counts and costs of employees for the next 12 months on a monthly basis.

2. Displaying the forecast history on a daily granularity.

Full time equivalent (FTE) means the amount of work an employee can do. If he has a working capacity of 100% he does 1.0 FTE. If he only works the half day, he does only 0.5 FTE.
Head counts are simply the amount of employees the customer has, not regarding the working capacity.
And costs are monthly salaries and further costs paid for an employee.

Because forecasts are a fact to change, we should actualize the forecasts stored in the fact table. But regarding the second requirement, we cannot simply change or delete the records in our fact table, because if we do that, we will lose our history. So there ... Read More »

By Thomas Bolt on 8/16/2007 9:42 AM

What a joy this morning as I looked at the connect site of PPS. CTP4 has been released this night (europe ;-))! I'm currently downloading all components and then I will try to bring them up on my virtual machine. More about my experiences with CTP4 later...

What are the key-advantages of CTP4? The following listing is a copy from the official "Whats new"-document downloaded from connect.

 

 

Planning Server

Business Modeler

· Business Rule Templates. Several additional rule templates have been added.

· PPSCmd. The command-line tool had some additions to provide ability for scripting of overall system processes. For example, the ability to deploy and reprocess models and data.

· Migration. Additional feature wo ... Read More »