MVC: Providing an Input Form

Please see my other MVC articles. Leveraging the Html form object to receive user input. Collecting user input is one of the most common deliverables in Internet applications for which MVC provides the Html object to automatically display HTML input control matching attributes of a data Model. First, I’ll create a new View which houses…

MVC: Class Diagram – Building a Class

Please see my other MVC articles. Leveraging a GUI tool to quickly construct a class. In this article I will demonstrate Visual Studio’s Class Diagram tool which allows developers to quickly construct a C# class with much less errors. First, I’ll create a new model class to demonstrate this feature. Next, I’ll invoke the tool.…

MVC: Bundles

Please see my other MVC articles. Instantiating Script and Style References Efficiently Including references to script and style tags has always been a tedious and time-consuming web development task. Now MVC 4 provides an alternate method by allowing developers to “bundle” files together into a single reference which may then be referenced to “render” them…

T-SQL: Common Table Expressions

Please see my other Database Development articles. Performing Recursive Queries. Prior to SQL Server 2005, performing recursive actions on data required the use of temporary tables, cursive, or some other memory-intensive method. Now, performing such operations requires much less code and avoids the previous performance increase. For this example, we’ll begin with a generic table…

T-SQL: Rank()

Please see my other Database Development articles. Ranking Functions There are several new impressive advancements in the latest version of t-sql; this article will focus on “Ranking” functions. Prior to the release of SQL Server 2005 with its t-sql enhancements, working with blocks of related data was clunky at best. T-sql authors mostly relied on…

SSAS: Refining a Dimension

Adding New Dimension Fields Often in the cycle of cube development it become necessary to add new fields to a dimension for future reporting purposes. In this article, I will demonstrate adding an aggregation of [City, State] to the data source view. First, I’ll open the AW data source view. Now I need to find…

SSAS Dimension Hierarchies

Refining Cube Dimensions Once a cube has been created, dimensions should be refined by updating attributes and hierarchies. With respect to hierarchies, there are two primary types – natural and reporting. Natural Natural hierarchies contains relationships between levels and expand as they are traversed. One example of a natural hierarchy resides within the Geography dimension.…

SSAS: Creating a Cube

Implementing a Cube Design Now that I’ve covered the basics of how to design a cube, I will demonstrate the basics of creating a cube. Within Solution Explorer, launch the New Cube Wizard. Proceed to the second step and select to Use existing tables and click Next. Select a measure group(s) which contain measures and dimensions…

SSAS: BIDS Exploring a Cube

Using BIDS to Explorer Cube Characteristics and Data With my cube designed and created, I will now leverage the BIDS interface to expose its rich features. First, I’ll select the Customer dimension to Explore Data. Now I’m presented with a series of sub-tabs which I may use to view Table data, use a Pivot Table, view…