SQLServerPedia

I have been wanting to get into BI for some time now. My experience includes installation and some light troubleshooting on SSRS and SSAS 2005. I have some light performance tuning of SSAS 2000 and 7.0 OLAP. I have had intentions of attending BI sessions at the conferences but I always end up in the performance or internals sessions. This may be because most of the session would be over my head.

I am going to start with the basics and work my way up. With the available material, I will have to pull from many sources. The good thing about this is it will give me more real world knowledge but the test may be a little harder without "test prep" type material.

Here is my study material. If anyone has any other resources, please let me know. jason****remove****@statisticsio.com

Books:

McGraw Hill Osborne Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL.Server 2005

Addison Wesley Practical Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2005

Wrox Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

MS Press - Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Step-By-Step

MS Press - Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services Step-By-Step

MS Virtual Labs:

Here is a DMF of interest in sp2. This could be applied some of my previous blogs.

sys.dm_exec_text_query_plan

Returns the Showplan in text format for a Transact-SQL batch or for a specific statement within the batch. The query plan specified by the plan handle can either be cached or currently executing. This table-valued function is similar to sys.dm_exec_query_plan, but has the following differences:

select * from
sys.dm_exec_requests cross apply sys.dm_exec_text_query_plan(plan_handle)

Sometimes it might be necessary to use the same expression on different places throughout a report. You can of course just copy and paste the expression every time you need it, but if you’ll ever need to change this expression, you will have to change it for every field you’re using it for. Therefore it’s good practice to write this expression just once and refer to it where necessary. This can be done by implementing embedded code, that can be entered through the report’s property dialog on the Code tab.

(Click “Report”, “Report Properties” and select the Code tab)

Assume you have some calculated percentage fields and you need to set the background color depending on it’s value:

-          when the value is less then 20% : background must be red

-          when the value is between 20 and 80%:  background must be orange

-          when the value is greater then 80%: background must be green

Add the following function to the custom code textbox:

Now you can access this function as a member of the class called “Code”:

The Embedded Code Window is a very handy tool to quickly add some easy functions to your report.

But at this time, Embedded Code only supports Visual Basic and the Embedded Code Window is nothing more then a large textbox, without Intellisense or any debugging info.

Embedded Code can also only be reached from within the same report.  

Therefore if you want multiple reports to access the same code, or you would like to write your code in C#,  or do some really advanced things, you should consider accessing a .NET assembly from the embedded code, which I will explain in one of my future articles…