HTC EVO 3D

I saw the HTC EVO 3D for the first time today. One of the guys in the office just got it so he showed it off a little bit. I have not played with the phone much, but it is famous for its capability to capture 3D photos and videos. I saw him do this and I have to say that it is pretty impressive. No 3D glasses needed to review the photos or videos. I will research a little bit more on the technology that is used to produce this effect.

Nevertheless, seeing a 3D video for this first time without glasses is intriguing and probably even more so to technology lovers!

Hermann

Dimensions not allowing drill down in PerformancePoint OLAP Grid

This is just a quick note that I want to make before I forget it. I recently ran across an incident that I hadn't before and I just wanted to mention it in case it might help someone. The incident was that my dimensions in my OLAP grids were not providing me with the drill down little plus signs that you would normally see next to them. This grid was for a cash flow developed for a business, and since a cash flow is a calculation involving values from the Balance Sheet and Income Statement the Cash Flow SSAS cube included a lot of calculated values.

What happened was that these calculated values were not properly defined for every level of the hierarchy so Analysis Services did not know how to roll these values up to their parent level. I revised all the calculations and the dimensions worked fine.

Hermann

Creating Time Filters in PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer

This post is about creating time filters in PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer, as the title suggests. Of course there are more than one way to do this, but one very simple way is to correctly add Time Intelligence (you can ask me how to do this) to your cube in BIDS and then when you are working in Dashboard Designer, you can add a "Member Name" filter. For this filter, you have to then choose the correct time dimension that is associated with your cube. Once you have chosen the correct time dimension, select the members of the hierarchy, that you want to use for the filter. Once you are done configuring the filter, you have to create a connection between it and the region that you want to be influenced by this filter.

To do this, you can add your filter to one of your dashboards, for instance. Towards the right side of the filter, there should appear a down arrow, that, when clicked, will give you two options, one of which will be Create Connection. Click on this and then select the item that you want to connect to e.g a chart). On the Values tab select the time dimension of the chart that you want to connect to and then you can select Member Unique Name in the bottom drop-down list.

Your filter should now be configured correctly. Save and deploy your Dashboard. Test it.

Hermann

MDX: Define "Empty" cells so that they are not displayed

This post might not be important to many readers as this is probably a very simple technique to someone who knows MDX well, but I am hoping that at some point someone will find this helpful.

I had named calculations in my SSAS cube and the IIF formula defined a cell to contain "" (empty string) when the calculation could not be completed. The problem with this definition was that the "Filter Empty Rows" setting in Dashboard Designer did not work since these cells were not empty (although the looked empty), but instead they contained the empty string. The easiest fix is to instead of defining the cell to contain "", define it to contain null. Now the cell will be considered empty by Dashboard Designer and would be filtered.

Hermann

HTC Sensation 4G

I had the HTC Sensation in my hands for the first time today. I myself own a LG G2X and without being bias, my experience with the HTC Sensation interface was not as smooth as the one on my G2X. Physically, it is smaller than my phone, and I have to say that the screen quality is very high. I am not sure if it comes out with Android Gingerbread, but nevertheless from what I experienced in my 10 minutes with the phone, the G2X is still at the top of the line for T-mobile.

Hermann

The new Barnes and Noble Nook

I just had the new Nook in my hands about an hour ago. Very impressive device indeed. Extremely light, complete touch screen, and a complete, simple user experience makes this the top reader for me at the moment. It has very impressive battery life - up to 2 months! It is not ideally optimized for web surfing, but it nevertheless provides for a very smooth experience. It is much shorter and a little wider compared to the first generation nook.

At this moment I don't know all the ins and outs of the device yet, but I have quite a lot of experience with e-readers and I played around with it for about 10 minutes. I was very impressed. I also think that it comes at a very reasonable price at $139. Let me know if anyone wants to know more about this device.

Hermann

MDX

I am currently getting to spend quite a bit of time diving into the MDX language. MDX stands for Multidimensional Expressions. A very interesting and powerful language indeed. It is different from any other computer language that I have come across and is specifically used to query multidimensional structures like SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Cubes) cubes. I am just starting off with it, but it seems like I will be spending an enormous amount of time on it so I hope that I can help anyone with questions about it, out soon!

Hermann