Archive for month: July, 2012

SSIS 2012 “Cancelled” Status Issues

29 Jul
July 29, 2012

If you have used Microsoft development products long enough, then you must be familiar with the error reporting nightmares some of their products exhibit, the classic “please check the error log for more details” message, even though you are in the error log, is not just frustrating, but in my opinion is a bug that shouldn’t even reach end consumer, especially when you are handing the developers a framework for them to build on and extend.

Microsoft’s SSIS and SSRS have always been shortchanged when it comes to error logging; whether they are run-time errors on the server, or even while trying to debug a package or a report in a development environment, there is no lack of confusing error messages that send you down hours of so many long winded paths that leaves you tugging on strings hoping something might eventually make sense.

Today I will go through one of SSIS 2012 new quirks, the SSIS Canceled Status (or error), and what could be the reasons that you might receive such an error.

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What is Business Intelligence (BI)

26 Jul
July 26, 2012


Ok, this might be abit of a general question, as am sure anyone who found themselves in this blog knows a thing or two about BI, but in this post I will try to give a more holistic overview of what is a full Business Intelligence offering, and what dimensions constitutes a full analytical offering. Additionally, having a BI infrastructure is all well and good, but at the end of the day, the over-all goal of any BI platform is to identify and act upon the data as quickly as possible, when the data is most useful for strategic, tactical or operational business decisions, a concept that we will try and explore in this article.

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Excel 13 (Office 365 ProPlus) Now Ships with Power View

24 Jul
July 24, 2012

The new Office 365 ProPlus is different and very exciting, there is a host of new features that makes this release really stand-out, for example installing this new Office suite will only take 5 seconds, after which you are able to run it and interact with it while it is still finalizing the installation in the background. This is very cool and a change from the usual 1 hour installation process.

What makes Excel 13 really exciting for me is the introduction of the new Power View visualization and data exploration layer baked into this new release. This is what I will be covering throughout this post

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