The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2010. That’s about 24 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 6 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 55 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 84kb.

The busiest day of the year was March 5th with 255 views. The most popular post that day was 10 to 11.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were daniweb.com, codeproject.com, twitter.com, facebook.com, and networkedblogs.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for ramy mahrous, business intelligence performance elearning, “ramy mahrous”, bi c#, and business intelligence keywords.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

10 to 11 March 2010
17 comments

Building ASP.NET Reporting OLAP-Based Application Part-1 April 2009
6 comments

Building ASP.NET Reporting OLAP-Based Application Part-2 April 2009
3 comments

About | Ramy A. Mahrous April 2009
12 comments

Building ASP.NET Reporting OLAP-Based Application Part-3 April 2009
6 comments

SQL Server Setup has encountered the following error:
Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called on a control until the window handle has been created..

I won’t recommend you to go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975055 and waste your time installing SQL Server 2008 SP 1 because it won’t solve the problem.

Solution
Close IE\Explorer windows or anything you can open after doing your installation process yes that’s it… weird..

The SQL Server service failed to start. For more information, see the SQL Server Books Online topics, “How to: View SQL Server 2005 Setup Log Files” and “Starting SQL Server Manually.”

For help, click: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=20476&ProdName=Microsoft+SQL+Server&ProdVer=9.00.1399.06&EvtSrc=setup.rll&EvtID=29503&EvtType=sqlsetuplib%5cservice.cpp%40Do_sqlScript%40sqls%3a%3aService%3a%3aStart%40x41d

To solve the problem I had to disable the antivirus (BitDefender -what I’ve-) seems it prevents the windows installer to start any services! to over come this prevention stop your antivirus.

Another error message may appear after you install\uninstall SQL Server due to errors in installations…

SQL Server Setup has encountered the following error: The given key was not present in the dictionary..

although I’ve valid\legal SQL Server serial number I don’t know from where this error comes! what I had to is to install “Windows Install Clean Up” to clean any SQL Server installation. download it from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

Don’t worry what you should do is to, right click on Internet Explorer or your favorite browser then run as administrator and retype your SSRS Reports site URL http://{Server-Name}/reports you’ll find you can manage everything as you see

To not open your browser as administrator everytime you manage your Reports you should add your current user as Content Manager or as you wish. From Properties-> New Role Assignment -> Type the username of current user -> Select role -> OK

Open it without run as administrator it will look like as you want.

UPDATE (Sunday, Mar 7, 2010 at 2:39 am)
1- NOW 10 to 11 supports numbers with country code format +20 and 0020
2- NOW 10 to 11 supports migrating numbers with any known format.

After the decision of The Egyptian Agency for Telecommunications to change cell phone numbers 11 numbers instead of 10 http://www.masrawy.com/News/Egypt/Politics/2010/march/4/mobinil_vodafon_etisalat.aspx , I found it too tough to change your contacts number manually so I’ve developed this application to do that for you. 

Simply my application 10 to 11 (thank you my mother, she suggested this name) iterates all outlook contacts not SIM contacts and modify the mobile phone number of your contacts to the new format\schema which The Egyptian Agency for Telecommunication announced earlier. 

Download it http://cid-3e2288e7a8e55f56.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public%20folder/10%20to%2011%20setup.zip

Vodafone
010 => 0100
016 => 0106
019 => 0109 

Mobinil
012 => 0122
017 => 0127
018 => 0128 

Etisalat
011 => 0111
014 => 0114 

And you can choose what to change to the new format….
 

I prefer to backup you contacts by using this program PPCPimBackup get it from http://tinyurl.com/l8wh5a

I’ve windows 6.1; I tried it and it works like champ

Download it http://cid-3e2288e7a8e55f56.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public%20folder/10%20to%2011%20setup.zip

Business Intelligence: The art of extracting right information in timely manner to right person from raw data, it doesn’t depend on specific technology but very wide of technologies depend on; like Data Mining. It makes the organization realize its resources, potential and give the Big Image* to the status of its goals.

Operational Business Intelligence: Business Intelligence Systems build on the same Business Intelligence process ETL, Analysis then Reporting but they don’t care about KPIs and Measures more than data listing.

Tactical Business Intelligence: Business Intelligence Systems build on the same Business Intelligence process ETL, Analysis then Reporting beside they give a wide solutions to tactical managers who can use them to get the most of KPIs (Profit in dollars, number of CRM tickets, etc) to take their organization step towards its goals.

Strategic Business Intelligence: Business Intelligence Systems build on the same Business Intelligence process ETL, Analysis then Reporting it helps the top management get the status -very brief status- of the organizations and its step towards its goals.

Measure\Fact: What’s the organization looks for, profit in currency, revenue, number of user come to website, number of CRM tickets, etc…

Dimension: How the Measure\Fact measured per, means profit in currency (Measure\Fact) can be measured per time, sales region, sales person, product type, etc.. so we call time, sales region, sales person, product type dimensions. Simply everything you can group by…

Hierarchy dimension: Dimension has self-relationship like time dimension we may see Year, Quarter, Month, Week, Day and may be more deep details. Simply everything with more than one level (deparment employee).

Attribute: Fact\Dimension property like Currency dimension may have currency name in English, currency name in Arabic; those are attributes.

Calculated member: Is a more comlicated calculation derived from the existing measures.

Data Mart: Dimension and Facts for specific department in the organization.

Data Warehouse: Big datamarts connected together.

ROLAP: Relational-OLAP: OLAP architecture where data stored in relational database where there’s no limit for data storage.

MOLAP: multidimensional-OLAP: OLAP architecture where data stored in multidimensional cube for fast retrieval for data and for executing very complicated queries.

HOLAP: Hybird-OLAP: OLAP architecture combines the both of ROLAP and MOLAP

Snowflake Schema: Data mart schema where Measures connected to Facts, but hierarchies dimensions not in one table like Time dimension, we have Year dimension connection with Month which connects with Day and so on.

Star Schema: Data mart schema where Measures connected to Facts, and all hierarchies dimensions exist in one table, in Time dimension example we find Year, Month, Day, etc. data exists on one table.

Report: form to list all data in tubular or matrix format where use can drill through to find more information about something.

KPI: Key Performance Indicator, $200 million is success to organization X? for sure the answer is I don’t know. so KPI come to say if the profit is more than H we made success and if it lower than L then we didn’t manage to achieve our target. so in scorecards we use some symbols like green light in case the measure exceeds the KPI. so dashboards depend on the KPI to give the right view to top management users because they just understand numbers.

Dashboard: Interactive report with various charts which state the status of organization POI, users can drill through and drill down to see more and more details.

Scorecard: Very interactive report with a lot of symbols and less words, for strategic managers depends mainly on KPIs.

ETL: refers to Extract, Transform and Load process which happens in the most Business Intelligence solutions to get data from different heterogenous sources, cleansing it then load it to the data warehouse.

OLAP: OnLine Analytical Processing, the stage to analyze the data to get the information.

OLTP: Online Transactional Processing simply is the backend data repository for any business application; It maintains data for business process and it’s from the sources of ETL process.

Data Mining\Forecasting: Built-in algorithms use to predicate the future based on existing data.

Cube: Microsoft term which represents “Data Mart”.

*I quoted it from my manager Yasmeen El-Nizamy (Senior BI Developer | LINKDev)

Do you see, you can make it better, please send me at ramymahrous[at]gmail[dot]com

SQL Server replication requires the actual server name to make a connection to the server. Connections through a server alias, IP address, or any other alternate name are not supported. Specify the actual server name, ‘Another server name‘. (Replication.Utilities)

It always appears as you change the instance name manually or network administrators change the computer name.

Actually your server name still as it’s and not changed with above changes so to avoid getting this message you should write these couple of T-SQL scripts every time you do one or all changes on the instance name

I’ll post a series about those features en shaaa ALLAH in the next days, but let’s begin with Database engine features
#1 connectivity to SQL Azure: what’s SQL Azure? is a cloud-based relational database service built on SQL Server® technologies. To learn more about SQL Azure press here

First you need to have Microsoft SQL Server R2 November CTP, get all about it from here and SQL Azure account (I got it from Microsoft Connect)

Open SSMS, and using your Azure account (Server name, username and password) try to login

And if it’s your first time to use SQL Azure you’ll get that

Then you should configure SQL Azure to accept connections from your IP, go to https://ctpportal.database.windows.net/ and select your project or create a new one

Select firewall settings to set your IP allowed to Access SQL Azure

Enter the rule name make it meaningful to be easy for your to manage, IP range, here’s I select my IP I don’t want anyone to access else me

Important note, don’t run to SSMS to login, it just take some minutes from 2-5 minutes to apply changes.

Try now

Congrats, you’re now connected -have problem till now?- please contact me Open new query window, create database, objects using T-SQL… you just need to create your database

Then close this query window to create objects inside “FirstDatabase” database you should refersh server databases and select “FirstDatabase” then new query Window, because USE Database not supported.

Updated on 11/11/2009 7:47 PM

Note: The download links below will launch the Akamai download manager which is designed to provide you with more control over your download experience.

Download now Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP http://care.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/7/B/4/7B4A1F68-4D05-42C1-8982-E5CD8492C6FA/SQLFULL_x86_ENU.exe

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 add-in to Excel that allows very large sets of data to be manipulated efficiently aka Microsoft Gemini now its formal name is PowerPivot

Download: What’s New in SQL Server 2008 R2 November Community Technology Preview (CTP) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=89550298-D564-40C5-B586-30DC3F909F6F&displaylang=en

It’s now available for download for MSDN and TechNet subscribers,  and it will be available to the general public on November 11^th http://blogs.technet.com/dataplatforminsider/archive/2009/11/09/announcing-the-sql-server-2008-r2-november-ctp.aspx