I don’t know if this is bash or an OS X feature, but nonetheless: today I discovered that there’s tab-completion that takes .ssh/config into account! I on-instinct did a tab after writing part of the hostname I wanted and (boom!) there it was, auto-completed with a colon. So to SSH to my mini I did “ssh mi“ and go “scp mini:”. If this is the bash-guys or the darwin guys, I don’t know, I hope to find out. Nonetheless: a big thank-you!

What bugs me very much about working with KPIs in PerformancePoint’s Dashboard is that you cannot do simple calculations. For instance, I have a sales cube that has the measures unit cost and price the unit was sold for. I would like to say that a loss (price/cost < 1) makes the KPI red, a <20% margin makes it yellow and >=20% is green. In Excel this would be trivial: choose the price column, type ‘/‘ and choose the cost column: voila, you’ve got your calculation. Not so with Dashboard. As Rex Parker from Microsoft writes in the PerformancePoint Team Blog you’ll have to write an MDX query. I don’t believe MDX is for the average business person that PerformancePoint Dashboard is aimed at. But until MS puts together an expression tool that is as least as understandable as Excel, Scott Larson has put together a nice little tutorial to show how to write such expressions with MDX.

I agree with Scott’s comment: I’m beginning to suspect that the use of PerformancePoint, at least in it’s early releases, will require at least functional knowledge of MDX and PerformancePoint Expression Language (PEL) for PerformancePoint Planning, neither of which are exactly business-user friendly

In Scott Larsons blogpost referenced in my last post he gives a short but important note: his favourite MDX resource. And I agree: a 62 article series in learning MDX. Since I’ve worked with SQL “all my life” I’ve not bothered to much with MDX, but with this series I’m really looking forward to learning it better. To do the tutorials you’ll need the free MS-SQL 2000 samples (that unfortunately aren’t bundled with neither MS-SQL 2005 nor MS-SQL 2008). You can download them from here. I should note that while it compiles fine with VB6, using it with Visual Studio 2005 left me with a pretty large debugging job. But don’t worry, the data sources are included and that really is all you need to work through the tutorials. For the interface, you’ve got BIDS

One of my main gripes with Microsoft SSIS is that there is no way to reuse logic. In my data integration task I needed to do the same lookup and translation tasks (typically convert to upper case, replace “ with ‘N/A’, look up column in side table and use the IDs from that table instead) many times, in my case when importing data from an Axapta database. CozyRoc got back to me and told me that they have released an SSIS component that includes new components for reusability of code and flows. Being a coder I had given up on SSIS and rewritten my work in C#/SQL, but next time I’m very much looking forward to using it.

At work I’m looking at PerformancePoint, and being a newbie with this product I of course do all the newbie errors. That’s why I was so happy when finding Nick Barclay‘s blogpost where he explains all about the way-to-common connection errors. Big thank you to Nick.