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April is turning out to be a busy month for me. Apart from taking the beta SQL Server 2012 certification exams and some reviews, I am also speaking at the Charlotte SSUG and at SQL Saturday #118 (Madison) and #130 (Jacksonville). I have also submitted at a couple of other SQL Saturdays, so if you do...
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How fast time flies! Another new version of SQL Server has been launched and it seems like it was only a few days ago that SQL Server 2008 was released. Those days, I was mainly focussing on SSRS, and I can’t express in words how happy I was when I saw all the new features in SSRS 2008 and 2008 R2. Today...
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I have always been inspired by a particular quote from Arthur C Clarke - “ The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible ”. The more you think of it, the more you make sense out of it. If you decide in your mind that something is impossible, you will never...
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One of my first blogs here was based on the Rich Text functionality in SSRS 2008 . However I found very little use of that in my projects and did not explore that area much. However a recent question in the forums made me rethink on the way I thought about the rich text functionality. The question was...
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I love working with map reports and I don’t miss a chance to fiddle around with it. In fact, I am such a big fan that I think there would be very few sessions (in English, of course!) involving SSRS and maps that I would have missed, both online and live. Also, this is one of those topics that can make...
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As a BI consultant specializing in SSRS, I have had lots of frustrations and hard times because of Excel. Every now and then, I have some or other business user coming up to me and asking for some feature which is there in Excel but not in SSRS. If you have been following my blog, you would already know...
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I don’t know about you guys, but I am really petrified of public speaking. So I always try to read about it and it really gives me some comfort to know that I am not alone. In fact, if your fear of public speaking is between mild anxiety and complete terror, you are said to be well within the normal...
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Christmas time is one of my most favourite times of the year – the time when you can just lay back, relax, enjoy some quality time with your family and catch up with your old friends. While this Christmas time has been a little hectic for me considering that I changed my base from London, UK to Charlotte...
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This is usually the time of the year when I get to my laziest best. The cold weather and the approaching holiday season brings out the sloth in me and I have a huge backlog of articles I need to read as well as tend to. But somehow I have pulled up my socks and managed to come up with this article...
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All right, I know most of you Microsoft BI fans would be gushing over the new announcements made in PASS Summit 2011 last week. Now onwards, Project Crescent will be officially known as Power View, SQL Server Denali as SQL Server 2012, Juneau as SQL Server Data Tools and finally, we have a mobile BI...
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Over the short span of my career, I have seen many people get burnt out and change their careers from technology to some other field. It is easy to get disillusioned with a job that requires you to sit on a chair the entire day and "code" the same stuff. At the same time, I have also met people...
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This is my first book review in this year, though it is a good experience in writing my first book on SQL Server technologies and here it goes: Book Title: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services Publishers: Packt Publishers Master Data Services (MDS) is one of the new features that are introduced...
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So one more objective struck off from my annual list. Even though I had nightmares where my laptop crashed just before my session, nothing untoward happened and I managed to complete my first session at SQLBits without any problems. The session was scheduled on Oct 1 at 8.10 am in the morning (at a time...
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Recently I got a very interesting query from one of my colleagues. He was trying to sort a table in a SSRS report based on an integer member property, but the sort results were coming wrong according to him. He said that the report was treating the property field as a character and claimed that this...
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As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, nowadays I am busy preparing the design document of my new project and sending it around for reviews. If there is one question I could pick from the list that keeps coming back to me frequently, that would be this – why are you recommending to store all the...