I have lot of data in MS Access, and for analysis I need tools. Might you suggest any tools for data mining and analysis (OLAP)?
Support for Access (and other various non-SQL Server data sources) will be included in the upcoming SQL Server 2008 R2 release (this release is focusing on self-service BI). You can follow how the project is progressing at http://blogs.msdn.com/gemini.
It depends on your data volumes the the complexity of the relationships that you want to investigate:
(1) Moderate volumes with low complexity relationships - use queries, pivot's graphs and reports in ms-access.
(2) High volume and or high complexity relationships - consider up sizing to SQL server and using the more grown-up data cubes (OLAP), stored procedures etc.
A possible solution can be Excel 2010 using the new Power Pivot Add-on.
It really depend on the type of analisys needed.
Federico
I guess your best bet would be to import your data into SQL Server using SQL Server Integration Services - should be pretty straightforward and painless.
Once in SQL Server, you have the Analysis Services at your disposal which give you all these capabilities for OLAP analysis.
I don't think there's much for MS Access directly.
Marc
If it is not too much data, import it into Excel and use the privot table functionality.
If it is too much for that then SQL Server is the way to go.
An alternative OLAP solution is to use icCube to connect directly to your MS Access file.
Related
We are planning to migrate an Oracle 10g database to SQL Server 2008 R2. At the moment nothing is implemented in the target database and this will give us the opportunity to change and improve the existing schema during the migration.
Not only the data, but also stored procedures and views have to be imported.
I already worked with SSIS and I found an excellent product for data manipulation. A colleague mentioned SSMA for the migration. However after some research on the net it seems that it would be suitable mainly for data migration and conversion, while SSIS seems to provide a wider set of functinalities (Tasks, custom scripts, etc).
Which are the pro/contra of the two products and which one would best fit for the task?
I would recommend a hybrid approach. Use SSMA to convert the schema and objects from Oracle to SQL Server. Then improve and or change the objects as you see fit on the SQL end. Once your satisfied with your new schema. Use SSIS to move the data still waiting on the Oracle side into the new schema waiting for it on SQL.
As for a quick comparison of SSMA and SSIS... SSIS is by far superior for the ETL aspects of moving data from one place to another; but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for the creation/modification phase of what you describe above. I think you'll find that process much easier with SSMA. On the flip side SSMA doesn't offer much in the way of transformation during the copy process.
I would go for an hybrid of the two.
Do you know you can trig SSMA from command line? This way you can execute the SSMA migration as a part of the SSIS solution.
You can also save your SSMA project as an SSIS package:
Once migrated keep doing the extra work with SSIS.
Is there any link or zip file where I could get whole MS BI warehouse project (sample) from starting to end? (2008)
Incremental load and even possible creating cubes too. What kind of problems one faced in real time projects, such things.
I could find things on you tube in parts but couldn't link it. Please help.
Rohan
I think the best reference implementation for the MS BI stack is Project REAL. According to Microsoft:
In Project REAL we are creating a reference implementation of a
business intelligence (BI) system using real large-scale data from a
real customer. The goal is to discover the best practices for creating
BI systems with SQL Server 2005 and to build a system that exhibits as
many of those best practices as we can. This project is not just a
demo —we are creating this system for ongoing operation. It is a
complete system, including daily incremental updates of the data,
large multiuser workloads, and system monitoring.
It contains:
A set of instructions for setting up the environment
Guidance on how to explore the implementation
A sample relational data warehouse database (a subset of the Project REAL data warehouse)
A sample source database (from which we pull incremental updates)
SSIS packages that implement the ETL operations
An SSAS cube definition and scripts for processing the cube from the sample warehouse
Sample SSRS reports
Sample data mining models for predicting out-of-stock
conditions in stores
Sample client views in briefing books for the Proclarity and Panorama BI front-end tools
You can download it here - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=12134
you can get the AdventureWorks database and datawarehouse (with the cube) here: http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/
not sure about the SSIS packages
In one of my application Iam using SQL SERVER 2008, I like to implement audit tables for few tables. One option I have to create triggers on the respective tables. Can anyone suggest me any other good, robust and secure option.
SQL Server 2008 has a new auditing feature: Auditing in SQL Server 2008.
There is also Change Data Capture
Triggers are the usual way to go. Another option could be to handle this in your stored procedures. Of course this assumes, that all data modification goes via stored procedure. Since you are on SQL Server 2008 and assuming you don't care about any lower version, check out the new auditing features here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd392015.aspx
You don't mentione which edition of SQL Server you are using as the Auditing features are only available in the Enterprise edition.
You should download a copy of the free eBook Developing Time-Oriented Database Applications in SQL by Richard T. Snodgrass from here: http://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/rts/tdbbook.pdf.
He talks about auditing and many other time related issues in databases.
I'm trying to create a completely new database from an existing MySQL database, bringing over both data and schema, but so far the only way I've been able to do this is to first import the MySQL database into MS Access, and then into SQL Server 2005? Crazy right? Surely, there is a way that doesn't involve a tedious, custom time-consuming programming, right (perhaps using SSIS)?
A few additions to my original description above:
Its a pretty good size database (easily a few gigs).
I'm working in an MS environment (asp.net, C#)
I'm under a tight deadline so I'm looking for an automated process that requires little to no effort in the conversion process.
SSIS would be the preferred way via BIDS (VS 2005)
Thanks for all the great input!
I believe that using the phpMyAdmin tool you can script the MySQL database structure and data into a sql script. Then you simply run those two scripts on your SQL Server 2005 database and it should, in most cases, create the database and fill it with data. It's been a couple years since I had to do it myself, but as I recall that was the process I used to transfer a MySQL database to SQL Server in the past. You will probably have to alter the structure script to change some of the data types to their SQL Server equivalents, but the data should load just fine once you've got the data types all sorted.
I think you can use SQLYog to generate some fairly standard SQL which will dump out and recreate your db, with data. You may have to massage its output for SQL Server's dialect of SQL a bit, though...
The responses I received were certainly helpful, but the solution it would seem is to do a mysqldump and then run that script from SSIS, massaging the output as needed; however, AFAIK it is not possible to use VS 2005 BIDS to create an SSIS package that completely transfers a MySQL database to a SQL Server 2005 database (data and schema) using Windows Vista 64. I said AFAIK, but who knows the interwebs have much to reveal :)
I have seen recommendations for installing SSRS 2005 and it states that you should separate it from the database engine that hosts the data sources for your reports, that you should not install them on the same server.
Is there any equivalent documentation for SSRS 2008 that provides guidelines/best practices for installation? I am assuming that the same holds true for SSRS 2008 as it did for SSRS 2005 but have not been able to find any documentation on it.
I cannot point you to any specific documentation. However, I have visited the Microsoft testing labs in Charlotte, NC several times over the last 5 years to test SQL Server 00/05/08 SSRS based applications and was provided sage advise by the MS SQL experts.
They recommended that no other applications be run on the database server other that the SQL engine. This included SSRS. This was not easy at all to accomplish in the SQL 2000 product but become much more digestible with the scale-out options in SQL 2008.
It really does depend on the load profile of your application. You need to test and quantify the engine load verses the reporting load.
One consideration is that the memory and CPU consumption of SSRS '08 is significantly less that '05 due to re-designs in the reporting engine as confirmed by Microsoft and our testing.
My advice would be to load/stress test your application and adjust your hardware and deployment strategy accordingly. Using Microsoft Testing Labs for this is great environment because they have tons of hardware to test multiple scale scenarios to determine the options for your target deployment scenario.
I hope that provides some insight.
This series of web pages from the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team provides recommendations for SSRS 2008
Reporting Services Scale-Out Architecture
Report Server Catalog Best Practices
Reporting Services Scale-Out Deployment Best Practices
Reporting Services Performance Optimizations