SQL BI

Last post on SqlJunkies, now I am only on SqlBlog.com

In the last months I cross-posted from my blog on SqlBlog.com to SqlJunkies.com, but starting from today I will be only on http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo.

This is my last post on this blog on SqlJunkies.com. See you on SqlBlog!

What means writing a book

I and Paolo Pialorsi have been interviewed at TechEd by Ken Rosen. We talked about our experience as book authors of Programming LINQ.

If you are interested in writing a book, or if you simply want to see our faces and hear our italian accent, you can watch the video available in both low resolution and high resolution. Enjoy!

TechEd 2008 book signing and other meetings

I'm already in Orlando for TechEd 2008 Developers. Tomorrow I and Paolo Pialorsi will be at the TechEd bookshop for a book signing of our just released Programming Microsoft LINQ, scheduled at 4:00PM-4:30PM. I wrote a post a few days a go with the list of chapters included in the book. LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities are two technologies that are significative to access data, even if you don't have to use them in every possible scenario.

If you are attending to TechEd, meet us tomorrow at the bookshop to talk about LINQ!

Programming Microsoft LINQ finally shipping

Finally, the Programming Microsoft LINQ book is available. We (I and Paolo Pialorsi, the other author) updated the website that supports our books (http://programminglinq.com), where you can download the sample code of the book.

What’s in this book? Well, we tried to cover everything that was in RTM, but we also introduced technologies that are still in beta or in early CTP stages, like LINQ to Entities and Parallel LINQ. To give you an idea of the content, at the end of this post there is a list of the chapters included in the book.

Now, the next news is that I will be at TechEd Developers next week in Orlando. Feel free to contact me if you want to arrange a meeting talking about LINQ or SSAS. Moreover, I and Paolo will be at the bookshop for book signing on June 3rd from 4:00pm to 4:30pm. I hope to see you there!

In these days I'm already working on a new project, this time on Data Warehousing and Analysis Services. More news on this blog in a few weeks...

Programming Microsoft LINQ

·         Part I LINQ FOUNDATIONS

o   1 LINQ Introduction

o   2 LINQ Syntax Fundamentals

o   3 LINQ to Objects

·         Part II LINQ to Relational Data

o   4 LINQ to SQL: Querying Data

o   5 LINQ to SQL: Managing Data

o   6 Tools for LINQ to SQL

o   7 LINQ to DataSet

o   8 LINQ to Entities

·         Part III LINQ and XML

o   9 LINQ to XML: Managing the XML Infoset

o   10 LINQ to XML: Querying Nodes

·         Part IV Advanced LINQ

o   11 Inside Expression Trees

o   12 Extending LINQ

o   13 Parallel LINQ

o   14 Other LINQ Implementations

·         Part V Applied LINQ

o   15 LINQ in a Multitier Solution

o   16 LINQ and ASP.NET

o   17 LINQ and WPF/Silverlight

o   18 LINQ and the Windows Communication Foundation

·         Appendixes

o   A ADO.NET Entity Framework

o   B C# 3.0: New Language Features

o   C Visual Basic 2008: New Language Features

Multiple Hierarchies from SQLCAT

I'm still late with blog reading and sometimes I discover interesting things one or two months later than the original posting. I just read the SQLCAT analysis of the several solutions available to handle multiple parent-child hierarchies within a single dimension. The multiple hierarchies pattern described in my many-to-many paper has been used (with some variations) and now I have the "SQLCAT certification" that this model is faster than others!

I think there is space for improvement in this area and the many-to-many space is still a relatively unexplored space. If you have experience adopting those models, please share your knowledge - and if you are shy, write me directly and I'll post the interesting data.

Many-to-Many Session at European PASS Conference 2008

I'll be a speaker at the European PASS Conference 2008 next week in Dusseldorf. I will talk about advanced dimensional modeling using many-to-many relationship. The content is based on "The many-to-many revolution" paper I wrote two years ago. If you will attend that conference and you already used some of the models I described in the paper, I will be happy to get direct feedback from you.

My session is scheduled on Wednesday at 14:30. Unfortunately, I will not have much time after the session because I will have to go to the airport - for this reason, contact me in advance if you want, I'll be at the conference starting from Monday.

LINQ to extract object permission from SSAS

Yesterday one customer of mine encountered the issue described in KB933836 and posted also by Chris Sells.

The issue is that the deployment of a SSAS database always overwrite object permissions defined on database objects like cubes. The "keep existing roles" setting of deployment wizard does not preserve those information. I needed to solve the issue and I simply made a simple program that creates an XMLA file with object permissions that I need to restore after database deployment. I used LINQ and XML Literals in Visual Basic - I wrote a book about LINQ and I have to find a reason for this, but I really think that LINQ saved my time.

I will write a more complete article about this issue one day, may be... by now, if you have the same issue, you can contact me to get the code I wrote. If you don't need it, look at the readability of LINQ in a case like this.

If I will receive some request, I will consider to publish this simple tool.

PASS Europe 2008

It's a shame I haven't blogged for two months, but I've been really (I mean - REALLY) busy finishing the upcoming Microsoft Programming LINQ book. Now I'm coming back to my BI world and the first news is that I'll speak about SSAS models based on many-to-many relationships at the European PASS Conference 2008, April 14-16 2008, Neuss, Germany (Europe, of course...). For those of you who want to know what I'm going to talk about... you can read The Many-to-Many Revolution paper I wrote more than one year ago. It is based on SSAS 2005, but there is nothing to add with SSAS 2008 too.

In reality I and Alberto developed some variation of the base models I described in the paper. In particular, we had great success with the Balance Reclassification model (sorry, we still don't have an article about it) that allows defining multiple parent-child hierarchies on a balance sheet, also using sign rollup operator (which is not natively supported if you have a many-to-many relationship with a parent-child hierarchy). Unfortunately, we desisted using it in a Gb-sized fact table for performance reason. But it is working well in many other typical scenarios, where balance sheet fact table has a granularity that gives a lower size of the fact table.

Let me know if this is an argument (Balance Reclassification model) that is interesting for you - I could give some anticipation in a blog post or in a short article.