Top 10 Best Practices for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

I was fortunate enough to attend Microsoft’s Tech-Ed event in Berlin in Nov 2009 and attended a session given by Markus Raatz, which was very informative.

Some interesting topic areas covered included:

• Attribute Relationships
• Dimensions
• Measure Groups
• ROLAP and MOLAP storage
• Aggregations
• User defined Hierachies
• Partitions
• Data Providers and
• Error Handling

He also mentioned visiting the Project REAL site for more information:

Project REAL is a cooperative effort between Microsoft and a number of technology partners in the business intelligence (BI) industry to build on actual customer scenarios to discover best practices for creating BI applications based on SQL Server 2005. Project REAL uses authentic customer data to work through customer deployment issues and to address the full range of real-world challenges that companies face when analyzing large data sets.

His PowerPoint 2007 presentation deck can be found here.

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ZoomIt

I was fortunate enough to attend Microsoft’s Tech-Ed event in Berlin in Nov 2009 and whilst at the conference, most of the presenters used a useful utility to zoom in on different areas of the screen, to highlight things to the session attendees.

I found out they were using a free piece of software called Zoomit.

ZoomIt is a screen zoom and annotation tool for technical presentations that include application demonstrations. ZoomIt runs unobtrusively in the tray and activates with customizable hotkeys to zoom in on an area of the screen, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image. ZoomIt works on all versions of Windows and you can use pen input for ZoomIt drawing on tablet PCs.

I will definately be using it for my future computer presentations. Download it from here