SharePoint 2013 and SQL Powered BI

I know i have been AWOL now for some time… i have been heavily focused on bringing up Sharepoint 2013…and also empowering it with SQL 2012. And, actually there’s even more to it than that. One of the benefits of 2013 is that Microsoft has extended the value proposition by enabling the creation of a public site w/o real cost. Not only that…Microsoft says that you can access your SSAS components from that public site. Ok…think about that. That’s really big! That’s what we collectively thought as well.

HOWEVER, there are some caveats. Actually there are quite a few caveats that you can easily stumble into. Going forward, i expect to blog about these as we find them.

The first I’m going to mention has to do with Anonymous access to an excel file. It turns out that while other users aren’t limited (so far as I know today), Anonymous user can’t browse excel files greater than 10 MB! So, for context, we had built a PowerPivot based excel with some 180 MB of data. We published it to the sharepoint 2013 site. We went to the site ourselves (ie. IE knew our identity and passed it to SharePoint. Sharepoint showed us the file in a browser. Yeay! Success!

Hold your horses…check with anonymous! We anonymously logged in to the sharepoint public site, navigate to the Excel file, attempt to open, and ERROR! Arghh! Why would Microsoft do this? Well, it’s money, of course!

See here for more Microsoftian data:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/file-size-limits-for-workbooks-in-sharepoint-online-HA104099212.aspx

 

More to follow!

Tabular logging of Users is not like Multidimensional!

A few days ago, I wanted to start tracking on who was using my Tabular solutions. (If you wandered into this post… I’m talking about Microsoft’s SQL server Analysis Services.) With Multidimensional you have a table, that given the right circumstances, Look here: “SSAS not logging?” will track users of your Multidimensional solutions (think “cubes”…that’s what we used to call them). Well, Tabular has all the administrative set up as does Multidimensional… meaning right click on the tabular instance inside SSMS, and you’ll be given options wherein you could set up logging of users touching your Tabular solutions. WOW! GREAT! Just what i wanted…and just what i expected.

BUT! It didn’t work! And, it won’t work! Why? Because the Logging on Multidimensional models was originally conceived for the purpose of an optimization wizard…wherein, user queries would help guide what should be pre-aggregated. Well, Tabular, using Vertipaq doesn’t do any pre-aggregation. So, they have disabled that logging function. Yes, you CAN set it up. And yes, the table does get built in wherever you designate…but, NO it never gets filled in with details of users’ usage. Go figure!