Predictive Analysis: I Bet You Didn’t Know I Would Blog This Today

Quick question: Where would you go to find some basil in your local grocery store? Did you say “by the other herbs?” Or did you say “by the tomatoes?” If you are like me, then you would go looking for basil by the other herbs because, well, that is a natural, logical grouping of products. … Read more

Backing Up SSAS Databases

As we get more involved with the BI stack of tools we find ourselves learning some of the nuances of supporting all of these new environments. One such example is SSAS. When people build and deploy cubes to an instance of SSAS they (eventually) get around to asking about restores and recovery. And since the … Read more

SQL 2008 Data Mining

I often hear people use the terms “Data Mining” and “Data Analysis” as if they are interchangeable. To me, at least, they mean two very distinct things. Hopefully this post will help to explain what I believe to be the difference in their meanings. So, let’s say you are opening up a mine. First things … Read more

SSAS Weird Science

The other day we did an install of SSAS on a server without loading the database engine. Everything went fine, the end user started accessing the service and then we started talking about how we should make certain we are taking backups of the objects that are being created. Now, how would you think to … Read more