Until now, I have found working with Kerberos when setting up a SQL Server stack to be a complete nightmarish experience, mainly due to two reasons:

• Working with Kerberos usually requires access rights to Active Directory for the account setting up this authentication protocol on the stack, in order to be able to effectively diagnose the setup and also configure the Service Principal Names (SPN) for the various SQL Server and SharePoint service accounts, and setup delegation. This means SQL Server architects and Network Administrators need to collaborate in order to correctly configure the stack, which is often an unpleasant and long winded experience of trial and error.
• The lack of a centralized diagnostic and configuration tools for Kerberos setup on SQL Server makes this tasks very tedious, particularly if you follow the limited number of online resources out there to setup Kerberos, and find that they do not apply exactly to your situation, or do not work exactly as intended after following the lengthy steps, and you are left with a very limited option in terms of diagnosing exactly what went wrong.

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Excel 2013 brings forward an array of new and exciting features at the finger tips of the data analysts, ranging from a shiny new visualization and exploratory data analysis platform (PowerView) to a number of new pivoting features as well as a powerful in-memory data modelling engine (PowerPivot) enabled by default.

Among all these features, the new Excel delivers a few different options for visualizing geographical and location based data, each visualization technique serving a different purpose (with a specific set of features) or targeting a particular demographic segment of the over-all Excel user-base. This is a short post introducing some techniques for visualizing geo information in Excel.

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In a previous post I described how to convert an SSRS graph into a Highcharts graph by consuming the XML output of the report from the SSRS Web Service and converting that to an input for a Highcharts graph.

That article seemed to be very popular (in fact was the top most popular for a while), so I decided to take this concept a step further, In this article I will show you how, using JavaScript injection into SSRS reports, you can display a Highcharts graph from within SSRS itself (just like any other SSRS report) when the SSRS report is rendered into HTML.

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There has been a lot of buzz on Twitter going around today about Microsoft’s new Mobile BI Platform, dubbed Project Helix, which was unveiled at Microsoft’s SharePoint event last week.

The screenshots originated from Just Blindbaek, and shows some aspects of the new Mobile BI Platform that is due to be released in 2013, if Microsoft’s Mobile BI roadmap is still accurate.

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Being able to holistically view your SQL Server Job Agent job schedules, how long each job took to run, what other jobs were running at the same time and the status of each job, should be a fundamental part of Job Agent management.

In this post I will be briefly introducing the current SSRS reports integrated into SSMS (or SQL Data Tools) that displays SQL Server Job Agent job information, as well as provide a new report (pictures above) that should give you a better holistic view of activities on your SQL Server Agent, as well as highlight any conflict in job schedules or times were no activity is occurring.

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Lovely post title, and a very annoying error.

I ran into this error while trying to communicate with Windows Management instrumentation in order to get the PathName installation parameter of the MSReportServer_ConfigurationSetting class (which hooks up to a Report Server instance). The issue is a very vague COM exception that doesn’t really give much information, what made the issue worse is that it is not a connection issue to the WMI Namespace, which works absolutely fine, the issue happens when my code tries to load any data from the namespace that I already successfully established a connection to.

In this post I will be giving a very brief introduction into WMI for Reporting Services, the reason this issue was happening, and how I managed to resolve this issue for my particular case.

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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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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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This is a short post to get you started with Microsoft’s new PowerPivot technology, which is part of the new SQL Server 2012 Self-Service BI.

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A few times in the past I ran into a situation with SQL Server’s SSRS, were I needed to download all the RDL files off the server, while also maintaining the folder hierarchy information.

There are many off-the-shelf scripts out-there online to help you download all your RDL files (along with security settings and other configuration files), this article goes through a couple of simple methods that can be used to retrieve the RDLs.

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