James works at Microsoft as a big data and data warehousing solution architect where he has been for most of the last eleven years. Before that he was an independent consultant working as a Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence architect and developer. He is a prior SQL Server MVP with over 40 years of IT experience. Check out his book Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh.
When Visual Studio 2010 was released about a year ago, I was very excited and wanted to quickly open up a SSAS project created in VS 2008 to see the new features that were available in VS 2010. So I copied … Continue reading →
Interesting new BI site from Microsoft called “BI Labs“. This site says: “BI Labs is a collection of experimental business intelligence projects and useful applications made available from internal sources across Microsoft. These projects are prototypes and concepts, and there are … Continue reading →
While there are many DBA’s who do business intelligence, or BI, I believe there are even more who do not. After all, there is enough tasks for DBA’s to keep them plenty busy without dealing with BI. We have repurposed … Continue reading →
Every couple of weeks I see this SSAS error when processing one of my cubes: Internal error: Invalid enumeration value. Please call customer support! is not a valid value for this element. An error occurred while parsing the ‘StorageMode’ element at … Continue reading →
A quick tip for you: Ever get some SQL or MDX sent to you in an email, or copied from a website, or pulled from SQL Profiler, that is difficult to understand because it’s not formatted? Well, there are a couple … Continue reading →
A quick little tip I found a couple of years ago. Ever use the count(*) syntax and it takes forever to count all the rows in a table? I had this problem when I would sometimes run counts on a … Continue reading →
There are three job boards that I use: Dice, Monster, and LinkedIn. I prefer Dice by far, since it has a ton of IT jobs on it, and it is focused solely on IT. Monster is OK, but it does … Continue reading →
I see this issue pop up every now and then: A developer creates an SSIS package in BIDS and gets it to run fine. Then the developer connects to Integration Services and uploads the package to the server, and then … Continue reading →
As I mentioned in my first post, I thought it would be real difficult to think of things to blog about. Turns out to be real easy. It’s just a matter of always having a “blogging mindset”. In other words, … Continue reading →
So my sister called me the other day to tell me she has a message on her laptop that said she has a virus. Those of us working in the IT industry know we are the one’s all our friends … Continue reading →
In creating this blog, I was thinking about using some catchy name for myself. Something with “DBA” in it. However, doing a quick Google search revealed there are so many already: Cranky DBA, Rambling DBA, Goal Keeping DBA, Mean Old … Continue reading →
Hello World. Stardate 1513.1. After reading that, if you know what I am referring to, you are a tech-head and may continue to read this blog 🙂 So, the reasons that I am blogging: 1) I really enjoy helping others. … Continue reading →