I found myself recently trying to remember how a formula I wrote a few months ago in Report Builder. Doing the same thing twice, made me think I should put it on the blog, so that next time I won't need to remember it... A user complained a report in report builder didn't run for her, as she divided two measures and the report would error when the denominator would equal zero. The error message she got was: Semantic query execution failed. Divide by zero error encountered. --------------...
I know this means I'm quite late writing about it, but I only came about to learn about this Visual Studio.Net add-in quite recently and I wanted to study it for a bit before writing about it. The BIDS Helper is an excellent extension to the BI Development Studio which comes with SQL Server 2005. Though my main uses for it are for the SSAS part of my BI project, the newly released version also has features for SSIS. Among other features for SSAS, the BIDS Helper enables you to: Validate aggregations...
I thought this time around, we'll discuss how solve order can affect your MDX calculations. I found that people tend to ignore this property, as it is not mentioned in the "Form View" of the Calculation Tab of the cube (which is what people usually tend to use when they write MDX for a cube. I hope this will be taken into consideration in SQL Server 2008). Now, this is a shame, as solve order can greatly affect your calculations. For each calculation you do in MDX, you can specify the optional property...