Kasper On BI

2008 could well be the year where data quality will be the next big thing. As more and more companies use data for all sorts of applications, it will be more and more important to make sure this data is of good quality.   Data Quality expert Larry English has claimed data quality is the second biggest threat to human kind, after global warming. Even with this bold statement he makes some good arguments, like: “Poor... Read more

I read this great article from Mike Schiff about the BI Predictions for 2008.   In a nutschell these items will be leading in 2008:– Industry Consolidation Will Continue– BI Deployment Will Become Easier– The Open Source Market Will Grow– Data Mining Usage Will Grow   Read more at: Major Data Warehousing Events of 2007 and Predictions for 2008   In another article on the same site a lookback on the turbulent BI year 2007... Read more

We use a report we export to Excell, the first page contains aggregates and then a SubReport with the details in different tabs (or pages if you export to something else).   You can do this by creating one report that contains all of the reports you want to export as subreports. Since the only way to create multiple tabs in an Excel workbook is to set a page break at the start or end of a... Read more

Ok yesterday i got a request for a report, our customer wants the same report as usual just data and some percentages over a total. Piece of cake, but then “Ow yeah he wants them over a dynamic amount of Countrys shown horziontally”. My heart dropped. Horizontal tables .. in reporting server .. no way.   So when i got back to my workplace i started googling inmediatly, after some fruitless attempts i found the... Read more

While previewing my report i got a “An unexpected error occurred in Report Processing. Index was outside the bounds of the array.”. I couldn’t  my out of bounds index anywhere. The Index error exception popped up when i added a new field to the report and hit “View Report”. Apparently the report caches these columns in Preview mode. I hit the Refresh button in Preview mode and the report magically appeared. Now clicking View Report works also.... Read more

Last night i was installing Visual Studio 2005 on my VMWare image with MS Server 2003 r2, it wouldn’t work. On my AMD Turion mobile the install took ages, and then after 2 hours: “Error 1718. File was rejected by digital signature policy”.   The Cause: “This problem occurs if the Windows Installer process has insufficient contiguous virtual memory to verify that the .msi package or the .msp package is correctly signed.” which MS had fixed in... Read more

Great SQL Server 2008 demo, includes BI as a core pillar: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/overviewdemo/ Read more

Bill Gates People are often curious about which applications and technology I use, and if there are features in the new version of Office that have changed the way I work. Without a doubt, the 2007 Microsoft Office system enables me to get my work done more easily and quickly than before. If you visit my office, you will probably notice right away that I have three large flat screen displays that sit together and are synchronized... Read more