I hope you can sort things out soon. As I think you suggest, it might (to some extent) be more important at some point to choose a direction, stick to it and deliver rather than to select one tool over another.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank you for your feedback. I stand corrected – your suggestions for attribute sorting make perfect sense. There also seems to be several options for fine-grained security which I really should have researched initially.

The object-to-object filtering you’re describing seems like a useful option. There are Excel plugins on the market that would allow SSAS end users to apply any kind of complex filter but not without some exposure to MDX – which I agree isn’t as easy as drag-and-drop.

Nice article, but a few points that nobody has seen to correct:

Attribute sorting – the date issue is a bit of a non-starter – that’s to do with particular universe design, rather than a flaw in BO itself. If you store your months as string data, you’ll only get an alphabetical sort. If you store your months as datetime data, and apply formatting in the report to make it read April, May, etc then it will sort in chronological fashion. Now when it comes to arbitrary sorting of other column values, I feel you have a point, but that’s something that has to be worked around in the DB layer, regardless of whether you’d be using cubes or universes – in which case you could generate another column for ordering and use that in BO too.

Your security point is not correct; since (at least) 2000 BO has had the ability to enforce security down to row level in tables; it’s not the case that one has to give all users complete access to the database. From what I remember (it’s been a good 7 years now since I last did admin work on a BO install) this should integrate with Windows authentication & groups, if you want it to.

Named sets are nice, and that is a failing of BO. On the other hand, a constant frustration for me in using SSAS via Excel is that I don’t get BO’s nice canned filters (eg dynamically generating last year) which gets you to a similar position. What’s more convenient (and maybe MS get round it elsewhere in the stack, but if you’ve seen it then it would be nice to be enlightened) is the object-to-object filtering in BO. If I’m working for an airline and I want to get all the flights we sold where the destination country is the same as the departure country, in BO that’s easy: you have object Destination Country = object Departure Country. In Excel I seem to be stuck with building a big pivot and taking the leading diagonal. I suppose if the predefined set existed, I could use that, but if it didn’t then being able to define these relations on the fly in BO seems more beneficial to analysts who aren’t deep in the IT department.

Take care.

I need your help on performance point server. I have installed pps on standalone on my server with sql server OAK-IPLAB-SP but when i try to add the users in pps it gives message ‘ no records found’.

When I take oak-iplab-sp\officeserver it gives me the message on the configuration i.e ‘ Sql sever instance sp2 should be running’ though it has been installed already while checking it on add and remove command.

My users are in active directory.

Kindly help me soon

Regards

Puneet Sud