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• How Orchard works

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  I just finished writing a long documentation topic on the Orchard project wiki that aims at being a good starting point for developers who want to understand the architecture, structure and general philosophy behind the Orchard CMS. It is not required reading for anyone who only wants to write Orchard modules and themes but hopefully it will help people who want to evaluate the platform and start writing patches. Read it here: http://orchardproject.net/docs/How-Orchard-works.ashx

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• xVelocity engines compared: VertiPaq vs ColumnStore #ssas #vertipaq #xvelocity #sql #tabular

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  During the last months I and Alberto worked in several projects using Analysis Services Tabular and we had to face real world issues, such as complex queries, large data volume, frequent data updates and so on. Sometime we faced the challenge of comparing Tabular performance with SQL Server. It seemed a non-sense, because even if the same core xVelocity technology is implemented in both products (SQL Server 2012 uses ColumnStore indexes, whereas Analysis Services 2012 uses VertiPaq), we initially assumed that the better optimization for the in-memory engine used by Analysis Services would have been always better than SQL Server. However, we discovered several important things: Processing time might be different and having data on SQL Server could make ColumnStore way faster for processing. Partitioning in SQL Server might be much more effective for query performance than Analysis Services. A single query can scale easily on more processor on SQL Server, whereas in Analysis Services the formula engine is single-threaded and could be a bottleneck for certain queries. In case of a large workload with many concurrent users, storage engine cache in Analysis Services could be a big advantage over SQL Server, especially for scalability As you can see, these considerations are not always obvious and you might be tempted to make other assumptions based on these information. Well, don’t do that. Before anything else, read the whitepaper VertiPaq vs ColumnStore Comparison written by Alberto Ferrari. Then, measure your workload. Finally, make some conclusion. But don’t make too many assumptions. You might be wrong, as we did at the beginning of this journey.

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• The Shift: how Orchard painlessly shifted to document storage, and how it’ll affect you

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  We’ve known it all along. The storage for Orchard content items would be much more efficient using a document database than a relational one. Orchard content items are composed of parts that serialize naturally into infoset kinds of documents. Storing them as relational data like we’ve done so far was unnatural and requires the data for a single item to span multiple tables, related through 1-1 relationships. This means lots of joins in queries, and a great potential for Select N+1 problems. Document databases, unfortunately, are still a tough sell in many places that prefer the more familiar relational model. Being able to x-copy Orchard to hosters has also been a basic constraint in the design of Orchard. Combine those with the necessity at the time to run in medium trust, and with license compatibility issues, and you’ll find yourself with very few reasonable choices. So we went, a little reluctantly, for relational SQL stores, with the dream of one day transitioning to document storage. We have played for a while with the idea of building our own document storage on top of SQL databases, and Sébastien implemented something more than decent along those lines, but we had a better way all along that we didn’t notice until recently… In Orchard, there are fields, which are named properties that you can add dynamically to a content part. Because they are so dynamic, we have been storing them as XML into a column on the main content item table. This infoset storage and its associated API are fairly generic, but were only used for fields. The breakthrough was when Sébastien realized how this existing storage could give us the advantages of document storage with minimal changes, while continuing to use relational databases as the substrate. public bool CommercialPrices { get { return this.Retrieve(p => p.CommercialPrices); } set { this.Store(p => p.CommercialPrices, value); } } This code is very compact and efficient because the API can infer from the expression what the type and name of the property are. It is then able to do the proper conversions for you. For this code to work in a content part, there is no need for a record at all. This is particularly nice for site settings: one query on one table and you get everything you need. This shows how the existing infoset solves the data storage problem, but you still need to query. Well, for those properties that need to be filtered and sorted on, you can still use the current record-based relational system. This of course continues to work. We do however provide APIs that make it trivial to store into both record properties and the infoset storage in one operation: public double Price { get { return Retrieve(r => r.Price); } set { Store(r => r.Price, value); } } This code looks strikingly similar to the non-record case above. The difference is that it will manage both the infoset and the record-based storages. The call to the Store method will send the data in both places, keeping them in sync. The call to the Retrieve method does something even cooler: if the property you’re looking for exists in the infoset, it will return it, but if it doesn’t, it will automatically look into the record for it. And if that wasn’t cool enough, it will take that value from the record and store it into the infoset for the next time it’s required. This means that your data will start automagically migrating to infoset storage just by virtue of using the code above instead of the usual: public double Price { get { return Record.Price; } set { Record.Price = value; } } As your users browse the site, it will get faster and faster as Select N+1 issues will optimize themselves away. If you preferred, you could still have explicit migration code, but it really shouldn’t be necessary most of the time. If you do already have code using QueryHints to mitigate Select N+1 issues, you might want to reconsider those, as with the new system, you’ll want to avoid joins that you don’t need for filtering or sorting, further optimizing your queries. There are some rare cases where the storage of the property must be handled differently. Check out this string[] property on SearchSettingsPart for example: public string[] SearchedFields { get { return (Retrieve<string>("SearchedFields") ?? "") .Split(new[] {',', ' '}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); } set { Store("SearchedFields", String.Join(", ", value)); } } The array of strings is transformed by the property accessors into and from a comma-separated list stored in a string. The Retrieve and Store overloads used in this case are lower-level versions that explicitly specify the type and name of the attribute to retrieve or store. You may be wondering what this means for code or operations that look directly at the database tables instead of going through the new infoset APIs. Even if there is a record, the infoset version of the property will win if it exists, so it is necessary to keep the infoset up-to-date. It’s not very complicated, but definitely something to keep in mind. Here is what a product record looks like in Nwazet.Commerce for example: And here is the same data in the infoset: The infoset is stored in Orchard_Framework_ContentItemRecord or Orchard_Framework_ContentItemVersionRecord, depending on whether the content type is versionable or not. A good way to find what you’re looking for is to inspect the record table first, as it’s usually easier to read, and then get the item record of the same id. Here is the detailed XML document for this product: <Data> <ProductPart Inventory="40" Price="18" Sku="pi-camera-box" OutOfStockMessage="" AllowBackOrder="false" Weight="0.2" Size="" ShippingCost="null" IsDigital="false" /> <ProductAttributesPart Attributes="" /> <AutoroutePart DisplayAlias="camera-box" /> <TitlePart Title="Nwazet Pi Camera Box" /> <BodyPart Text="[...]" /> <CommonPart CreatedUtc="2013-09-10T00:39:00Z" PublishedUtc="2013-09-14T01:07:47Z" /> </Data> The data is neatly organized under each part. It is easy to see how that document is all you need to know about that content item, all in one table. If you want to modify that data directly in the database, you should be careful to do it in both the record table and the infoset in the content item record. In this configuration, the record is now nothing more than an index, and will only be used for sorting and filtering. Of course, it’s perfectly fine to mix record-backed properties and record-less properties on the same part. It really depends what you think must be sorted and filtered on. In turn, this potentially simplifies migrations considerably. So here it is, the great shift of Orchard to document storage, something that Orchard has been designed for all along, and that we were able to implement with a satisfying and surprising economy of resources. Expect this code to make its way into the 1.8 version of Orchard when that’s available.

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• Dynamically switching the theme in Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  It may sound a little puzzling at first, but in Orchard CMS, more than one theme can be active at any given time. The reason for that is that we have an extensibility point that allows a module (or a theme) to participate in the choice of the theme to use, for each request. The motivation for building the theme engine this way was to enable developers to switch themes based on arbitrary criteria, such as user preferences or the user agent (if you want to serve a mobile theme for phones for example). The choice is made between the active themes, which is why there is a difference between the default theme and the active themes. In order to have a say in the choice of the theme, all you have to do is implement IThemeSelector. That interface is quite simple as it only has one method, GetTheme, that takes the current RequestContext and returns a ThemeSelectorResult or null if the implementation of the interface does not want to participate in the current request (we'll see an example in a moment). ThemeSelectorResult itself is just a ThemeName string property and an integer Priority. We're using a priority so that an arbitrary number of implementations of IThemeSelector can contribute to the choice of a theme. If you look for existing implementations of the interface in Orchard, you'll find four: AdminThemeSelector: selects the TheAdmin theme with a very high priority (100) if the current request is for a page that is part of the admin. Otherwise, null is returned, which enables other implementations to choose the theme. PreviewThemeSelector: selects the preview theme if there is one, with a high priority (90), and null otherwise. This enables administrators to view the site under a different theme while everybody else continues to see the current default theme. SiteThemeSelector: this is the implementation that is doing what you expect most of the time, which is to get the current theme from site settings and set it with a priority of –5. SafeModeThemeSelector: this is the fallback implementation, which should almost never win. It sets the theme as the safe mode theme, which has no style and just uses the default templates for everything. The priority is very low (-100). While this extensibility mechanism is great to have, I wanted to bring that level of choice into the hands of the site administrator rather than just developers. In order to achieve that, I built the Vandelay Theme Picker module. The module provides administration UI to create rules for theme selection. It provides its own extensibility point (the IThemeSelectionRule interface) and one implementation of a rule: UserAgentThemeSelectorRule. This rule gets the current user agent from the context and tries to match it with a regular expression that the administrator can configure in the admin UI. You can for example configure a rule with a regular expression that matches IE6 and serve a different subtheme where the stylesheet has been tweaked for such an antique browser. Another possible configuration is to detect mobile devices from their agent string and serve the mobile theme. All those operations can be done with this module entirely from the admin UI, without writing a line of code. The module also offers the administrator the opportunity to inject a link into the front-end in a specific zone and with a specific position that enables the user to switch to the default theme if he wishes to. This is especially useful for sites that use a mobile theme but still want to allow users to use the full desktop site. While the module is nice and flexible, it may be overkill. On my own personal blog, I have only two active themes: the desktop theme and the mobile theme. I'm fine with going into code to change the criteria on which to switch the theme, so I'm not using my own Theme Picker module. Instead, I made the mobile theme a theme with code (in other words there is a csproj file in the theme). The project includes a single C# file, my MobileThemeSelector for which the code is the following: public class MobileThemeSelector : IThemeSelector { private static readonly Regex _Msie678 = new Regex(@"^Mozilla\/4\.0 \(compatible; MSIE [678]" + @"\.0; Windows NT \d\.\d(.*)\)$", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); private ThemeSelectorResult _requestCache; private bool _requestCached; public ThemeSelectorResult GetTheme(RequestContext context) { if (_requestCached) return _requestCache; _requestCached = true; var userAgent = context.HttpContext.Request.UserAgent; if (userAgent.IndexOf("phone", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1 || _Msie678.IsMatch(userAgent) || userAgent.IndexOf("windows live writer", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1) { _requestCache = new ThemeSelectorResult { Priority = 10, ThemeName = "VuLuMobile" }; } return _requestCache; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The theme selector selects the current theme for Internet Explorer versions 6 to 8, for phones, and for Windows Live Writer (so that the theme that is used when I write posts is as simple as possible). What's interesting here is that it's the theme that selects itself here, based on its own criteria. This should give you a good panorama of what's possible in terms of dynamic theme selection in Orchard. I hope you find some fun uses for it. As usual, I can't wait to see what you're going to come up with…

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• New licensing for SQL Server 2012 and #BISM #Tabular usage

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Last week Microsoft announced a new licensing schema for SQL Server 2012. If you are interested in an extensive discussion of the new licensing scheme, Denny Cherry wrote a great blog post about that. I’d like to comment about the new BI Edition license. Teo Lachev already commented about the numbers and I agree with him. I generally like the new licensing mode of SQL 2012. It maintains a very low-entry barrier for SSRS/SSAS/SSIS (Standard Edition). It has a reasonable licensing schema for 20-50...(read more)

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• Converting #MDX to #DAX and PowerPivot Workshop online #ppws

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I just published the article Converting MDX to DAX – First Steps on the renewed SQLBI web site about converting MDX to DAX. The reason is that with BISM Tabular in Analysis Services 2012 you will be able to write queries in both DAX and MDX. If you already know MDX, you might wonder how to “translate” your MDX knowledge in DAX. I think that this is another way you can improve your knowledge about DAX: it has different concepts behind and this comparison should be helpful in this purpose. This is...(read more)

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• ASSIMP in my program is much slower to import than ASSIMP view program

  - by Marco

  The problem is really simple: if I try to load with the function aiImportFileExWithProperties a big model in my software (around 200.000 vertices), it takes more than one minute. If I try to load the very same model with ASSIMP view, it takes 2 seconds. For this comparison, both my software and Assimp view are using the dll version of the library at 64 bit, compiled by myself (Assimp64.dll). This is the relevant piece of code in my software // default pp steps unsigned int ppsteps = aiProcess_CalcTangentSpace | // calculate tangents and bitangents if possible aiProcess_JoinIdenticalVertices | // join identical vertices/ optimize indexing aiProcess_ValidateDataStructure | // perform a full validation of the loader's output aiProcess_ImproveCacheLocality | // improve the cache locality of the output vertices aiProcess_RemoveRedundantMaterials | // remove redundant materials aiProcess_FindDegenerates | // remove degenerated polygons from the import aiProcess_FindInvalidData | // detect invalid model data, such as invalid normal vectors aiProcess_GenUVCoords | // convert spherical, cylindrical, box and planar mapping to proper UVs aiProcess_TransformUVCoords | // preprocess UV transformations (scaling, translation ...) aiProcess_FindInstances | // search for instanced meshes and remove them by references to one master aiProcess_LimitBoneWeights | // limit bone weights to 4 per vertex aiProcess_OptimizeMeshes | // join small meshes, if possible; aiProcess_SplitByBoneCount | // split meshes with too many bones. Necessary for our (limited) hardware skinning shader 0; cout << "Loading " << pFile << "... "; aiPropertyStore* props = aiCreatePropertyStore(); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_IMPORT_TER_MAKE_UVS,1); aiSetImportPropertyFloat(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_GSN_MAX_SMOOTHING_ANGLE,80.f); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_SBP_REMOVE, aiPrimitiveType_LINE | aiPrimitiveType_POINT); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_GLOB_MEASURE_TIME,1); //aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_PTV_KEEP_HIERARCHY,1); // Call ASSIMPs C-API to load the file scene = (aiScene*)aiImportFileExWithProperties(pFile.c_str(), ppsteps | /* default pp steps */ aiProcess_GenSmoothNormals | // generate smooth normal vectors if not existing aiProcess_SplitLargeMeshes | // split large, unrenderable meshes into submeshes aiProcess_Triangulate | // triangulate polygons with more than 3 edges //aiProcess_ConvertToLeftHanded | // convert everything to D3D left handed space aiProcess_SortByPType | // make 'clean' meshes which consist of a single typ of primitives 0, NULL, props); aiReleasePropertyStore(props); if(!scene){ cout << aiGetErrorString() << endl; return 0; } this is the relevant piece of code in assimp view code // default pp steps unsigned int ppsteps = aiProcess_CalcTangentSpace | // calculate tangents and bitangents if possible aiProcess_JoinIdenticalVertices | // join identical vertices/ optimize indexing aiProcess_ValidateDataStructure | // perform a full validation of the loader's output aiProcess_ImproveCacheLocality | // improve the cache locality of the output vertices aiProcess_RemoveRedundantMaterials | // remove redundant materials aiProcess_FindDegenerates | // remove degenerated polygons from the import aiProcess_FindInvalidData | // detect invalid model data, such as invalid normal vectors aiProcess_GenUVCoords | // convert spherical, cylindrical, box and planar mapping to proper UVs aiProcess_TransformUVCoords | // preprocess UV transformations (scaling, translation ...) aiProcess_FindInstances | // search for instanced meshes and remove them by references to one master aiProcess_LimitBoneWeights | // limit bone weights to 4 per vertex aiProcess_OptimizeMeshes | // join small meshes, if possible; aiProcess_SplitByBoneCount | // split meshes with too many bones. Necessary for our (limited) hardware skinning shader 0; aiPropertyStore* props = aiCreatePropertyStore(); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_IMPORT_TER_MAKE_UVS,1); aiSetImportPropertyFloat(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_GSN_MAX_SMOOTHING_ANGLE,g_smoothAngle); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_SBP_REMOVE,nopointslines ? aiPrimitiveType_LINE | aiPrimitiveType_POINT : 0 ); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_GLOB_MEASURE_TIME,1); //aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_PTV_KEEP_HIERARCHY,1); // Call ASSIMPs C-API to load the file g_pcAsset->pcScene = (aiScene*)aiImportFileExWithProperties(g_szFileName, ppsteps | /* configurable pp steps */ aiProcess_GenSmoothNormals | // generate smooth normal vectors if not existing aiProcess_SplitLargeMeshes | // split large, unrenderable meshes into submeshes aiProcess_Triangulate | // triangulate polygons with more than 3 edges aiProcess_ConvertToLeftHanded | // convert everything to D3D left handed space aiProcess_SortByPType | // make 'clean' meshes which consist of a single typ of primitives 0, NULL, props); aiReleasePropertyStore(props); As you can see the code is nearly identical because I copied from assimp view. What could be the reason for such a difference in performance? The two software are using the same dll Assimp64.dll (compiled in my computer with vc++ 2010 express) and the same function aiImportFileExWithProperties to load the model, so I assume that the actual code employed is the same. How is it possible that the function aiImportFileExWithProperties is 100 times slower when called by my sotware than when called by assimp view? What am I missing? I am not good with dll, dynamic and static libraries so I might be missing something obvious. ------------------------------ UPDATE I found out the reason why the code is going slower. Basically I was running my software with "Start debugging" in VC++ 2010 Express. If I run the code outside VC++ 2010 I get same performance of assimp view. However now I have a new question. Why does the dll perform slower in VC++ debugging? I compiled it in release mode without debugging information. Is there any way to have the dll go fast in debugmode i.e. not debugging the dll? Because I am interested in debugging only my own code, not the dll that I assume is already working fine. I do not want to wait 2 minutes every time I want to load my software to debug. Does this request make sense?

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• Creating shapes on the fly

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  Most Orchard shapes get created from part drivers, but they are a lot more versatile than that. They can actually be created from pretty much anywhere, including from templates. One example can be found in the Layout.cshtml file of the ThemeMachine theme: WorkContext.Layout.Footer .Add(New.BadgeOfHonor(), "5"); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } What this is really doing is create a new shape called BadgeOfHonor and injecting it into the Footer global zone (that has not yet been defined, which in itself is quite awesome) with an ordering rank of "5". We can actually come up with something simpler, if we want to render the shape inline instead of sending it into a zone: @Display(New.BadgeOfHonor()) Now let's try something a little more elaborate and create a new shape for displaying a date and time: @Display(New.DateTime(date: DateTime.Now, format: "d/M/yyyy")) For the moment, this throws a "Shape type DateTime not found" exception because the system has no clue how to render a shape called "DateTime" yet. The BadgeOfHonor shape above was rendering something because there is a template for it in the theme: Themes/ThethemeMachine/Views/BadgeOfHonor.cshtml. We need to provide a template for our new shape to get rendered. Let's add a DateTime.cshtml file into our theme's Views folder in order to make the exception go away: Hi, I'm a date time shape. Now we're just missing one thing. Instead of displaying some static text, which is not very interesting, we can display the actual time that got passed into the shape's dynamic constructor. Those parameters will get added to the template's Model, so they are easy to retrieve: @(((DateTime)Model.date).ToString(Model.format)) Now that may remind you a little of WebForm's user controls. That's a fair comparison, except that these shapes are much more flexible (you can add properties on the fly as necessary), and that the actual rendering is decoupled from the "control". For example, any theme can override the template for a shape, you can use alternates, wrappers, etc. Most importantly, there is no lifecycle and protocol abstraction like there was in WebForms. I think this is a real improvement over previous attempts at similar things.

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• Binding a select in a client template

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  I recently got a question on one of my client template posts asking me how to bind a select tag’s value to data in client templates. I was surprised not to find anything on the web addressing the problem, so I thought I’d write a short post about it. It really is very simple once you know where to look. You just need to bind the value property of the select tag, like this: <select sys:value="{binding color}"> If you do it from markup like here, you just need to use the sys: prefix. It just works. Here’s the full source code for my sample page: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Binding a select tag</title> <script src=http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/beta/0911/Start.js type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> Sys.require(Sys.scripts.Templates, function() { var colors = [ "red", "green", "blue", "cyan", "purple", "yellow" ]; var things = [ { what: "object", color: "blue" }, { what: "entity", color: "purple" }, { what: "thing", color: "green" } ]; Sys.create.dataView("#thingList", { data: things, itemRendered: function(view, ctx) { Sys.create.dataView( Sys.get("#colorSelect", ctx), { data: colors }); } }); }); </script> <style type="text/css"> .sys-template {display: none;} </style> </head> <body xmlns:sys="javascript:Sys"> <div> <ul id="thingList" class="sys-template"> <li> <span sys:id="thingName" sys:style-color="{binding color}" >{{what}}</span> <select sys:id="colorSelect" sys:value="{binding color}" class="sys-template"> <option sys:value="{{$dataItem}}" sys:style-background-color="{{$dataItem}}" >{{$dataItem}}</option> </select> </li> </ul> </div> </body> </html> This produces the following page: Each of the items sees its color change as you select a different color in the drop-down. Other details worth noting in this page are the use of the script loader to get the framework from the CDN, and the sys:style-background-color syntax to bind the background color style property from markup. Of course, I’ve used a fair amount of custom ASP.NET Ajax markup in here, but everything could be done imperatively and with completely clean markup from the itemRendered event using Sys.bind.

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• Firefox messages in /var/log/messages

  - by Roy

  I happened to be browsing through /var/log/messages for another reason, and I stumbled across some messages apparently related to Firefox like this: Apr 5 15:36:59 myserver kernel: [18091.188462] type=1503 audit(1333658219.144:19): operation="open" pid=6396 parent=1 profile="/usr/lib/firefox-11.0/firefox{,*[^s][^h]}" requested_mask="::r" denied_mask="::r" fsuid=1000 ouid=0 name="/shr/RiverTrip.gpx" which are really puzzling me because I really don't see why Firefox would know about these files let alone output messages about them. The /shr directory is an NTFS partition I set up on my laptop so I can access it with either Ubuntu or Windows XP. The messages are consistently showing up for a few of the files in that directory, but not all. I haven't even looked at those files or done anything else with them in a long time! I have no idea what's special with those files; they appear to be picked at random as far as I can tell. I am using Ubuntu Release 10.04 (lucid), Kernel Linux 2.6.32-38, GNOME 2.30.2, Firefox 11.0 . I hope someone can explain these spooky messages!

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• SSAS Maestro Training in July 2012 #ssasmaestro #ssas

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  A few hours ago Chris Webb blogged about SSAS Maestro and I’d like to propagate the news, adding also some background info. SSAS Maestro is the premier certification on Analysis Services that selects the best experts in Analysis Services around the world. In 2011 Microsoft organized two rounds of training/exams for SSAS Maestros and up to now only 11 people from the first wave have been announced – around 10% of attendees of the course! In the next few days the new Maestros from the second round should be announced and this long process is caused by many factors that I’m going to explain. First, the course is just a step in the process. Before the course you receive a list of topics to study, including the slides of the course. During the course, students receive a lot of information that might not have been included in the slides and the best part of the course is class interaction. Students are expected to bring their experience to the table and comparing case studies, experiences and having long debates is an important part of the learning process. And it is also a part of the evaluation: good questions might be also more important than good answers! Finally, after the course, students have their homework and this may require one or two months to be completed. After that, a long (very long) evaluation process begins, taking into account homework, labs, participation… And for this reason the final evaluation may arrive months later after the course. We are going to improve and shorten this process with the next courses. The first wave of SSAS Maestro had been made by invitation only and now the program is opening, requiring a fee to participate in order to cover the cost of preparation, training and exam. The number of attendees will be limited and candidates will have to send their CV in order to be admitted to the course. Only experienced Analysis Services developers will be able to participate to this challenging program. So why you should do that? Well, only 10% of students passed the exam until now. So if you need 100% guarantee to pass the exam, you need to study a lot, before, during and after the course. But the course by itself is a precious opportunity to share experience, create networking and learn mission-critical enterprise-level best practices that it’s hard to find written on books. Oh, well, many existing white papers are a required reading *before* the course! The course is now 5 days long, and every day can be *very* long. We’ll have lectures and discussions in the morning and labs in the afternoon/evening. Plus some more lectures in one or two afternoons. A heavy part of the course is about performance optimization, capacity planning, monitoring. This edition will introduce also Tabular models, and don’t expect something you might find in the SSAS Tabular Workshop – only performance, scalability monitoring and optimization will be covered, knowing Analysis Services is a requirement just to be accepted! I and Chris Webb will be the teachers for this edition. The course is expensive. Applying for SSAS Maestro will cost around 7000€ plus taxes (reduced to 5000€ for students of a previous SSAS Maestro edition). And you will be locked in a training room for the large part of the week. So why you should do that? Well, as I said, this is a challenging course. You will not find the time to check your email – the content is just too much interesting to think you can be distracted by something else. Another good reason is that this course will take place in Italy. Well, the course will take place in the brand new Microsoft Innovation Campus, but in general we’ll be able to provide you hints to get great food and, if you are willing to attach one week-end to your trip, there are plenty of places to visit (and I’m not talking about the classic Rome-Florence-Venice) – you might really need to relax after such a week! Finally, the marking process after the course will be faster – we’d like to complete the evaluation within three months after the course, considering that 1-2 months might be required to complete the homework. If at this point you are not scared: registration will open in mid-April, but you can already write to [email protected] sending your CV/resume and a short description of your level of SSAS knowledge and experience. The selection process will start early and you may want to put your admission form on top of the FIFO queue!

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• So what are zones really?

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  There is a (not so) particular kind of shape in Orchard: zones. Functionally, zones are places where other shapes can render. There are top-level zones, the ones defined on Layout, where widgets typically go, and there are local zones that can be defined anywhere. These local zones are what you target in placement.info. Creating a zone is easy because it really is just an empty shape. Most themes include a helper for it: Func<dynamic, dynamic> Zone = x => Display(x); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } With this helper, you can create a zone by simply writing: @Zone(Model.Header) .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Let's deconstruct what's happening here with that weird Lambda. In the Layout template where we are working, the Model is the Layout shape itself, so Model.Header is really creating a new Header shape under Layout, or getting a reference to it if it already exists. The Zone function is then called on that object, which is equivalent to calling Display. In other words, you could have just written the following to get the exact same effect: @Display(Model.Header) The Zone helper function only exists to make the intent very explicit. Now here's something interesting: while this works in the Layout template, you can also make it work from any deeper-nested template and still create top-level zones. The difference is that wherever you are, Model is not the layout anymore so you need to access it in a different way: @Display(WorkContext.Layout.Header) This is still doing the exact same thing as above. One thing to know is that for top-level zones to be usable from the widget editing UI, you need one more thing, which is to specify it in the theme's manifest: Name: Contoso Author: The Orchard Team Description: A subtle and simple CMS themeVersion: 1.1 Tags: business, cms, modern, simple, subtle, product, service Website: http://www.orchardproject.net Zones: Header, Navigation, HomeFeaturedImage, HomeFeaturedHeadline, Messages, Content, ContentAside, TripelFirst, TripelSecond, TripelThird, Footer Local zones are just ordinary shapes like global zones, the only difference being that they are created on a deeper shape than layout. For example, in Content.cshtml, you can find our good old code fro creating a header zone: @Display(Model.Header) The difference here is that Model is no longer the Layout shape, so that zone will be local. The name of that local zone is what you specify in placement.info, for example: <Place Parts_Common_Metadata_Summary="Header:1"/> Now here's the really interesting part: zones do not even know that they are zones, and in fact any shape can be substituted. That means that if you want to add new shapes to the shape that some part has been emitting from its driver for example, you can absolutely do that. And because zones are so barebones as shapes go, they can be created the first time they are accessed. This is what enables us to add shapes into a zone before the code that you would think creates it has even run. For example, in the Layout.cshtml template in TheThemeMachine, the BadgeOfHonor shape is being injected into the Footer zone on line 47, even though that zone will really be "created" on line 168.

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• Donald Farmer left Microsoft for QlikView

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  As many of you probably already know, Donald Farmer left Microsoft to join QlikView . There are no doubts that Donald have been “the face of Microsoft BI” in the last years. This news has been initially perceived (me included, I admit) as a possible lack of confidence in Microsoft BI Vision, but after reading his blog and many other comments from Microsoft people, I can say it is not. This is more a personal choice, looking for a new challenge in a brilliant career in a relatively smaller environment...(read more)

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• Image libraries sites to download pro images with no credits expiration policy

  - by Marco Demaio

  I found professional image libraries sites like http://www.istockphoto.com or http://www.dreamstime.com are quite useful to add some cool images to a website either when filling its contents or when designing its graphic layout. Unfortunately both of the site I listed above use credits plans that expires after 12 months: you buy credits (using real bucks) and then you can download images, but if you don't use all the credits within 1 year, thay suck them out from your virtual wallet (I think it's really unfair, but too bad for you, that's their policy). Do you know about other good image libraries sites (from your real life experience) that use credits to download images, but thay don't expire after 12 months? Obviously I won't ignore your suggestions about any other image libraries sites.

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• Space partitioning when everything is moving

  - by Roy T.

  Background Together with a friend I'm working on a 2D game that is set in space. To make it as immersive and interactive as possible we want there to be thousands of objects freely floating around, some clustered together, others adrift in empty space. Challenge To unburden the rendering and physics engine we need to implement some sort of spatial partitioning. There are two challenges we have to overcome. The first challenge is that everything is moving so reconstructing/updating the data structure has to be extremely cheap since it will have to be done every frame. The second challenge is the distribution of objects, as said before there might be clusters of objects together and vast bits of empty space and to make it even worse there is no boundary to space. Existing technologies I've looked at existing techniques like BSP-Trees, QuadTrees, kd-Trees and even R-Trees but as far as I can tell these data structures aren't a perfect fit since updating a lot of objects that have moved to other cells is relatively expensive. What I've tried I made the decision that I need a data structure that is more geared toward rapid insertion/update than on giving back the least amount of possible hits given a query. For that purpose I made the cells implicit so each object, given it's position, can calculate in which cell(s) it should be. Then I use a HashMap that maps cell-coordinates to an ArrayList (the contents of the cell). This works fairly well since there is no memory lost on 'empty' cells and its easy to calculate which cells to inspect. However creating all those ArrayLists (worst case N) is expensive and so is growing the HashMap a lot of times (although that is slightly mitigated by giving it a large initial capacity). Problem OK so this works but still isn't very fast. Now I can try to micro-optimize the JAVA code. However I'm not expecting too much of that since the profiler tells me that most time is spent in creating all those objects that I use to store the cells. I'm hoping that there are some other tricks/algorithms out there that make this a lot faster so here is what my ideal data structure looks like: The number one priority is fast updating/reconstructing of the entire data structure Its less important to finely divide the objects into equally sized bins, we can draw a few extra objects and do a few extra collision checks if that means that updating is a little bit faster Memory is not really important (PC game)

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• Last day of early bird for PowerPivot Workshop in Dublin #ppws

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  The early bird discount for the PowerPivot Workshop in Dublin will expire today, Friday 11 March. There is also an upcoming workshop in Copenhagen (March 21-22, 2011) and a PowerPivot workshop in Zurich on April 4-5, 2011. I and Alberto are preparing new material in these days: something will integrate the workshop, other will be useful useful for future blog posts. We are discovering many new areas where the Vertipaq engine is really interesting for doing jobs he was probably not tought for! More...(read more)

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• Watch @marcorus and @ferrarialberto sessions online #teched #msteched #tee2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  In June I participated to two TechEd editions (North America and Europe). I and Alberto delivered a Pre Conference and two sessions about Tabular. Both conferences provides recorded sessions freely available on Channel 9 so that you can compare which one has been delivered in the best way! If you have to choose between the two versions, consider that in North America we receive more questions during and after the session (still recording), increasing the interaction, whereas in Europe questions usually comes after the session finished (so no recording available). If you’re curious, watch both and let me know which version you prefer, especially for Multidimensional vs Tabular! BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) If you are interested to learn SSAS Tabular, don’t miss the next SSAS Tabular Workshop online on September 3-4, 2012. We are also planning dates for another roadshow in Europe this fall and I’m happy to announce we’ll have two dates in Germany, too. More updates in the coming weeks.

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• Contents farms, scrapers sites, aggregators real world examples? [closed]

  - by Marco Demaio

  Contents farm, scrappers, aggregators real world examples? Could you plz clarify me: efreedom.com is a scraper site, not a content farm? Because it simply copies and pastes contents from stackoverflow. ehow.com and squidoo.com are contents farm? They don't copy and paste contents they just generate fresh new user generated content, but too much and too quickly. expert-exchange.com is NOT a content farm or a scraper site, right?! It's simply that many people (an me too) hates it (they also wrote to Matt Cutts) because it shows up hight in Google providing a useless question with no answer. There are also many sites that act as 'contents aggregators in the form of specialized directories' (let's call them CASD), I don't know how to else define them. Do they have a specific definition? Anyway are these type of CASD contents farms or scrapers sites or what else? Basically these CASD search for all sites of the same type i.e. “restaurants websites”, they copy and paste the contents found in “Restaurant A” and create in their aggregator site a new page called “Restaurant A”, then they do the same for all websites of the same type, thus creating a sort of directory of restaurants. Later on these CASD also sends an email to the owner of “Restaurant A” (usually the email is on the website) with a user and password to let him modify/update its own page on the CASD site. Later on these CASD might ask for money to the owner of “Restaurant A” because they bring him traffic, otherwise they remove its page on the aggregator. Someone could call these simply directories, but I think a directory is different because is something you need to add your site into by filling a form and not something that steals contents from your existing site without a specific acceptance from the site's owner. I also really wonder how Google will sort out all these mess sites packed of contents that show up more and more and everywhere in search results.

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• Attribute Overwriting in MDX

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Jeffrey Wang wrote a great blog post about attribute overwriting in MDX that is very clear and full of helpful pictures to show what happens when you write an MDX statement that writes into your multidimensional space. This is very common in an MDX Script and if you tried to customize the DateTool solution you probably experienced how hard this concept can be. The point is not that MDX is hard, is that a model based on multiple hierarchies in a dimension (and each attribute is a hierarchy by default!)...(read more)

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• Watch @marcorus and @ferrarialberto sessions online #teched #msteched #tee2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  In June I participated to two TechEd editions (North America and Europe). I and Alberto delivered a Pre Conference and two sessions about Tabular. Both conferences provides recorded sessions freely available on Channel 9 so that you can compare which one has been delivered in the best way! If you have to choose between the two versions, consider that in North America we receive more questions during and after the session (still recording), increasing the interaction, whereas in Europe questions usually comes after the session finished (so no recording available). If you’re curious, watch both and let me know which version you prefer, especially for Multidimensional vs Tabular! BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) BISM: Multidimensional vs. Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd North America 2012) Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular (TechEd Europe 2012) If you are interested to learn SSAS Tabular, don’t miss the next SSAS Tabular Workshop online on September 3-4, 2012. We are also planning dates for another roadshow in Europe this fall and I’m happy to announce we’ll have two dates in Germany, too. More updates in the coming weeks.

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• Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 – book coming in September

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  As you might already know, I and Alberto Ferrari are writing a book about PowerPivot 2010 for Excel. The official title is Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010: Give Your Data Meaning and you can already order it on Amazon ! However, it will be published in September 2010, and it is reasonable considered we are still in writing mode… Well, before buying it, consider that we are writing the book for the “real user” of PowerPivot, who doesn’t have a knowledge of MDX, multidimensional databases, ETL,...(read more)

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• Drawing transparent glyphs on the HTML canvas

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  The HTML canvas has a set of methods, createImageData and putImageData, that look like they will enable you to draw transparent shapes pixel by pixel. The data structures that you manipulate with these methods are pseudo-arrays of pixels, with four bytes per pixel. One byte for red, one for green, one for blue and one for alpha. This alpha byte makes one believe that you are going to be able to manage transparency, but that’s a lie. Here is a little script that attempts to overlay a simple generated pattern on top of a uniform background: var wrong = document.getElementById("wrong").getContext("2d"); wrong.fillStyle = "#ffd42a"; wrong.fillRect(0, 0, 64, 64); var overlay = wrong.createImageData(32, 32), data = overlay.data; fill(data); wrong.putImageData(overlay, 16, 16); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } where the fill method is setting the pixels in the lower-left half of the overlay to opaque red, and the rest to transparent black. And here’s how it renders: As you can see, the transparency byte was completely ignored. Or was it? in fact, what happens is more subtle. What happens is that the pixels from the image data, including their alpha byte, replaced the existing pixels of the canvas. So the alpha byte is not lost, it’s just that it wasn’t used by putImageData to combine the new pixels with the existing ones. This is in fact a clue to how to write a putImageData that works: we can first dump that image data into an intermediary canvas, and then compose that temporary canvas onto our main canvas. The method that we can use for this composition is drawImage, which works not only with image objects, but also with canvas objects. var right = document.getElementById("right").getContext("2d"); right.fillStyle = "#ffd42a"; right.fillRect(0, 0, 64, 64); var overlay = wrong.createImageData(32, 32), data = overlay.data; fill(data); var overlayCanvas = document.createElement("canvas"); overlayCanvas.width = overlayCanvas.height = 32; overlayCanvas.getContext("2d").putImageData(overlay, 0, 0); right.drawImage(overlayCanvas, 16, 16); And there is is, a version of putImageData that works like it should always have:

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• Installed on a machine with EFI and after installation, it says the disk is not bootable

  - by Roy Hocknull

  I installed Ubuntu 11.10 and the installation runs through fine. It then says reboot, and the machine says 'inserts a boot disk' which means the hard disk isn't bootable. The primary hard disk is an EFI device, and nothing seems to work. The machine in question is an Acer Aspire M3970 desktop. Core i5 2300, with 8Gb Ram. Main boot drive is an SSD (Vertex 2E 60Gb). I am trying to install the 11.10 x64 version. The installation I have tried from CD and USB stick. It goes through the install, allows you to partition the drives then installs all the packages. At the end it goes for a reboot, and asks you to remove the installation media. The PC then restarts and says no bootable disk. I tried it many times. In the end I have installed Fedora 15 x64 which works straight away with no messing. Unless this issues is fixed I have to drop 11.10 as a viable option. From my experience F15 isn't quite as polished as Ubuntu, but in this case - it works!! Is this a widespread problem or am I unique?

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• A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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• Learn more about MDX every day

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I started learning MDX in 1999 and after so many years of using it and teaching it to other people, I still discover something new every day. Not only because I use it in strange ways (well, this doesn’t happen every day, at least!) but because there are other interesting information to read. Jeffrey Wang just published another interesting blog about data prefetching in MDX, which explains very well some strange behavior that sometime I observed in some customer cube. I never had a clear explanation...(read more)

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