Suggested reading

I came across some nice articles and blog posts in the last weeks I wanted to share:

• How to communicate effectively in business by @SQLRockstar 
• PowerPivot vs Power View: Whats The Difference? by @PowerPivotPro
• The Index Your Queries will Never Request (A Clustered Index!) by @kendra_little
• The BI Survey 13 is now open, you can take it here

Hopefully you can get somehting useful out of the links!

You can also follow me on Twitter: @NickyvV

Suggested reading

I came across some nice articles and blog posts in the last weeks I wanted to share:

• Why won't my PowerPivot for Excel 2010 workbook upgrade to Excel 2013?
• The sessions and speakers for PASS Summit 2013 have been announced, check it out here!
• Firestorm: The story of the bushfire at Dunalley: A so-called "Interactive" by The Guardian
• PowerPivot: Relationship may be needed but I already have one?! by @PowerPivotPro
• SQLServerCentral Runs sp_Blitz - Query Plans
• A Sample SSRS Dashboard and some Tips & Tricks by @SQLJason

Hopefully you can get somehting useful out of the links!

You can also follow me on Twitter: @NickyvV

Suggested reading

I came across some nice articles and blog posts this week I wanted to share:

• The (unintended) network effect of Excel by @PowerPivotPro
• Junior DBA interview questions by @SQLRockstar
• Comments and descriptions in DAX by @TechniTrain
• How far can you push tabular? by @MarcoRus
• The emergence of Silicon Valley (documentary) by @AlexanderNL (+Alexander Klöpping)

Hopefully you can get somehting useful (or funny) out of the articles!

You can also follow me on Twitter: @NickyvV

Implementing Parent / Child Hierarchy in PowerPivot

We are currently implementing a Management Information Dashboard with Critical Success Factors and I ran into the problem of parent / child relationships in PowerPivot.
Since we are not working with Denali with the customer, I had to make a workaround to import the organisation structure into PowerPivot.

Special thanks to Alberto Ferrari and Marco Russo who made this possible on SQL Blog.com!

Of course not every project is the same, so I ran into a few issues while walking through the steps of Ferrari & Russo.
The first issue I had was that my ParentID and NodeID were both a VarChar (don't ask me, I don't know why..), so I had to convert / cast them as an INT.
Second, this organisation structure has the first two layers which are always the same and have no other nodes on the same level. So my structure actually starts at level 3. I edited the last select statement to leave out the first NodeID's and also changed the ComputeParentNodeIdAtLevels to not select Level1 and Level2. This worked for me.

Several measures with parent / child relations