Microsoft Business Intelligence World

Hide Total and Grand Total in the Cube browser

naveen.das — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:39:55 +0000

Many a times, people ask the question on how to disable or hide the Total and Grand Total rows in the result set when using the Cube Browser in SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio).

Here is a quick way to do that

When you browse a cube, you see Totals as below

Click on the dimension header in the Row Fields area

Right-click the highlighted region to bring up the menu as

Uncheck the Subtotal, and voila – it disappears

For more, just repeat the above steps

Today date using MDX

naveen.das — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:23:10 +0000

A lot of times the MDX query needs to look at current date/today date/system date as the reference member. There is no function equivalent to TSQL getdate(), but you can use the following piece of cide snippet to solve the purpose:

StrToMember(“[Date].[Date].[" + Format(now(), "yyyyMMdd") + "]“)

As an example, if you want to see the Sales for the last 7 days from the system date:

SELECT
[Measures].[Sales] ON COLUMNS,
LastPeriods(7, StrToMember(“[Date].[Date].[" + Format(now(), "dd-MM-yyyy") + "]“) ) ON ROWS
FROM [Cube]

Cannot open Sharepoint site url in Windows Explorer on Server 2008

naveen.das — Tue, 18 May 2010 04:16:19 +0000

Installed MOSS 2007 SP2 on a 64-bit machine running Windows Server 2008, and restored a site collection from another domain. Running into SSRS issues (but lets save that for later !). Tried to open the site url in Windows Explorer and ran into errors. Then tried openning a sharepoint list using Actions -> Open with Windows Explorer, and the same problem. Got this error message”

Your client does not support opening this list with Windows Explorer.

Turns out, this is because the Desktop Experience feature was not installed. Installed as follows:

1.Click Administrative Tools -> Server Manager
2.Expand the Features node
3.Click Add Features
4.Check Desktop Experience, and install
5.Restart the server once done.

Get date part from a datetime value – SQL

naveen.das — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:57:58 +0000

Quite often during data conversion processes, I am required to get only the date part from a datetime or a timestamp value. Here is a trick that does not involve CASTing and is quick to respond:

DATEADD(DAY, 0, DATEDIFF(DAY, 0, ))

Here is how it works: Whether smalldatetime or datetime, DATEDIFF(DAY, 0 returns the number of days since the base date, and DATEADD(DAY, 0 returns the integer as a date value.

Neat, isn’t it ?

How to verify the version of SQL Server

naveen.das — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:26:10 +0000

Use this query to verify the details on the SQL Server:

SELECT
SERVERPROPERTY(‘ProductVersion’) AS ProductVersion,
SERVERPROPERTY(‘ProductLevel’) AS ProductLevel,
SERVERPROPERTY(‘Edition’) AS Edition;

Of course, there are other ways, but the above is the most ‘coherent’.

Other convenient methods:

SELECT @@VERSION
Check the file version of sqlservr.exe

How to enable OPENROWSET and OPENDATASOURCE support in SQL Server 2008

naveen.das — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:05:24 +0000

SQL Server Surface area configuration is deprecated in SQL Server 2008, so this is how you should enable adhoc queries by setting OPENROWSET and OPENDATASOURCE options.

Run the following commands, one at a time:

sp_configure “show advanced options”,1

Output: Configuration option 'show advanced options' changed from 0 to 1. Run the RECONFIGURE statement to install.

reconfigure

Output: Command(s) completed successfully.

sp_configure “Ad Hoc Distributed Queries”,1

Output: Configuration option 'Ad Hoc Distributed Queries' changed from 0 to 1. Run the RECONFIGURE statement to install.

reconfigure

Output: Command(s) completed successfully.

And that is it.

Open a report created in Report Builder using Report Designer

naveen.das — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:35:23 +0000

Lets say you have a report created using Report Builder 2.0, in my case and want to open the report in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) using Report Designer.

There are umpteen number of places where they talk about the fact that you can open a report created in Report Builder using Report Designer, but exactly how to go about doing that is not provided.

So, I had to go hunt for myself and am providing the steps to be able to do that.

Go to the report using Report Manager, found at http://ReportServerURL/Reports
Click the Properties tab across the top
Click the Edit button under the Report Definition section
Now you can save the report definition as a .rdl file
Open the saved file in BIDS Project using Add Item functionality

Pass member structure in a parameter to a report in SSRS/Reporting Services

naveen.das — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:39:53 +0000

Created a report in SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) with the SSAS (SQL Server Avalysis Services) cube as the data source. In order to make the report dynamic, since the date hierarchy (defined as day, month, quarter) and the week hierarchy (defined as day, week) don’t align (weeks can span months, quarters, etc), I defined a parameter in the report, type text (SSAS can only pass string data to the reports as parameter values), named @ParameterValue.

The behavior is dynamic as based on the passed parameter, the underlying query changes the hierarchy

This report was then linked to the cells in the cube with the Reporting Action defined in the Actions Form Editor in the cube definition in SSAS, as

Target Type: Cells
Target Object: All Cells
Condition: [Ticket Report Date].[Date Hierarchy].CURRENTMEMBER.Level.ORDINAL > 1
Report Server Name:
Report Path: ReportServer?/CubeReports/TicketsOpenedDetails
Parameters: UrlEscapeFragment(MEMBERTOSTR( [Ticket Report Date].[Date Hierarchy].CURRENTMEMBER ))

For week report data, the following were changed:

Condition: [Ticket Report Date].[Week Hierarchy].CURRENTMEMBER.Level.ORDINAL = 2
Parameters: UrlEscapeFragment(MEMBERTOSTR( [Ticket Report Date].[Week Hierarchy].CURRENTMEMBER ))

Simulate LastNonEmptyChild behavior using MDX

naveen.das — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:19:19 +0000

As one of the tasks on hand, I had to figure out the backlog which by definition is a running total of all ‘open’ incidents at the end of a day. The dimension table being used has all the incident details and related attributes such as status, priority, category, etc

So, I created a caculated measure, named [Incident Backlog Count], based on the [Incident Count] measure in the measure group, as:

IIF ([date hierarchy].CurrentMember IS NULL,
NULL,
IIF(IsEmpty(Measures.[Incident Count]),
  IIF([date hierarchy].Parent.FirstChild IS [date hierarchy].CurrentMember,
   (Measures.[Incident Backlog Count], [date hierarchy].Parent.PrevMember),
   (Measures.[Incident Backlog Count], [date hierarchy].PrevMember)),
  IIF([date hierarchy].LEVEL IS [date hierarchy].[Date],
   (Measures.[Incident Count]),  IIF(IsEmpty((Measures.[Incident Backlog Count],[Date Hierarchy].LastChild)),
   (Measures.[Incident Backlog Count],[Date Hierarchy].LastChild.PrevMember),
   (Measures.[Incident Backlog Count],[Date Hierarchy].LastChild))
  )
)
)

The recursion worked well and the MDX seemed to simulate the LastNonEmptyChild function, except that at the leaf level, all the values were getting populated – even for the empty members !

For the life of me, I could not figure out the reason why this was happening, until I went in the Calculated Member Form Editor for the calculated measure and set the Additional Property Non Empty Behavior to the default measure [Incident Count]

Here’s what Microsoft has to say about the Calculated Member Form Editor

If the Non Empty Behavior property is blank, the calculated member must be evaluated repeatedly to determine if a member is empty. If the Non Empty Behavior property contains the name of a measure, the calculated member is treated as empty if the specified measure is empty.

SSAS error doing a lookup for a NULL, 0 or missing key value

naveen.das — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:04:04 +0000

There are 2 columns in my fact table, order_date and ship_date. Each row has an order_date, but ship_date is NULL, possibly for orders that are yet to be shipped, or were cancelled and never shipped. Pulling it in a cube kept generating the error message
Errors in the OLAP storage engine: The attribute key cannot be found when processing: Table: ‘table_name’, Column: ‘Column_name’, Value: ’0′. The attribute is ‘attribute_date’.

This was happening when trying to lookup the key values for NULL/missing ship_date against time dimension

To resolve this, we need to let the Fact table ignore NULLs or zero’s in the data

In BIDS, open the Cube Structure Tab
In the Measurements pane, select the Fact table the error is related to
Change ErrorConfiguration property to (custom)

Expand the ErrorConfiguration property,
set KetNotFound property to IgnoreError
set NullKeyNotAllowed to IgnoreError

This will pass-through all NULL or 0 key values to the dimension as “Unknown Member”, leaving all error handling for referential integrity issues for the Dimension to handle.

Open the related Dimension
In the Dimension Structure pane, select the Dimension name (at root level)
Change UnknownMember to Hidden

Process the Dimension, and then process the Cube