Author Archives: Melinda Cole

YTD Calculations

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Melinda Cole

Whether you’re creating a report, chart, KPI, or calculated measure, at some point you’ll probably need to add year-to-date calculations. It doesn’t matter if you’re using SQL or MDX, the technique to generate the From and To dates for a … Continue reading →

Posted in MDX, SQL | Leave a comment

When To Use NVARCHAR

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Melinda Cole

The Short Answer Only when you need to store multi-lingual (unicode) data.  The Nitty Gritty The fundamental unit of storage in a SQL Server database is an 8 KB page.  To paraphrase the MSDN, SQL Server reads and writes whole … Continue reading →

Posted in SQL Server | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

How to Generate Insert Scripts for Existing Data

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Melinda Cole

Let’s say you have a bunch of data stored in a table and you need to generate an insert script for each record. Maybe you need to save the scripts in source control or maybe you need the scripts to … Continue reading →

Posted in SQL Server, SSMS | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Virtual PC and Windows 7

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Melinda Cole

This morning while trying to spin up one of my Virutal PCs I ran into some peculiar error messages.  In case the same thing happens to you, the workaround is pretty simple.  When I opened Virtual PC and selected my … Continue reading →

Posted in Windows | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Prevent SSRS 2008 from Overwriting Datasets

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Melinda Cole

Report development is one of my favorite areas of Business Intelligence and I have to say I’ve been fairly happy with the new interface for SSRS 2008.  Except for when it comes to MDX queries.  Off the top of my … Continue reading →

Posted in SSRS | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

SQL Server 2005 Installation Failures

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Melinda Cole

Recently I was trying to install SQL Server 2005 on a workstation running Windows XP Professional SP3 and for some reason the installation kept failing. The first item in the list that failed was MSXML 6.0. After combing through the … Continue reading →

Posted in SQL Server | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

SharePoint JavaScript Error: Library Not Registered

Posted on January 5, 2010 by Melinda Cole

The other day one of my clients upgraded from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007.  Since then, whenever she went to her company’s SharePoint site, she received the following error:  ==================================================================  Website error details  User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows … Continue reading →

Posted in SharePoint | Tagged , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Adding Custom Components to SSIS

Posted on August 18, 2009 by Melinda Cole

Below are the basic steps for adding custom components to SSIS; however, for more in-depth information I highly recommend reading Matthew Roche’s post about deploying and testing custom SSIS components.  1. Register the custom assembly in the Global Assembly Cache … Continue reading →

Posted in SSIS | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Path Specified Cannot Be Used At This Time

Posted on August 3, 2009 by Melinda Cole

This morning I needed to check the properties for one of our SharePoint application pools so I logged onto the server and opened Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.  To my surprize the root was empty; it should have automatically connected to the … Continue reading →

Posted in SharePoint | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

PPS Filters: Beware of Changing Keys

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Melinda Cole

The other day I thought it would be fun to arbitrarily change the keys for all the members in one of my dimensions.  Actually, there was a legitimate reason but after the fact I realized there was a much better … Continue reading →

Posted in MDX, PPS | Tagged , , | Leave a comment