Regarding BIDS: as of 15th Feb 2012, the Books Online is wrong. It states that BIDS (for SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2) is "Visual Studio 2008 with additional project types".

No, it is not. For those who already read themselves through the links given above, it might be clear.

By the way, BIDS and its BI project types (Reporting Server, Analyis Services, Integration Services and 4 others) can be installed using the SQL Server installation utility. SSMS as well.
A SQL Server Developer Edition costs about $50 per developer.

Hope it helped.

[Update: There is no BIDS for SQL Server 2012. Instead, there is another tool.]

Saturday, February 11, 2012

I have continued to add content to Technet Wiki this week, and I just spot that I'm on the leaderboard. Very funny - it seems I'm more active this week than Ed Price. He must be on holiday or something :)OK, I have created less popular articles, but hey - he is an Official Wiki Ninja! :) [LOL, nice acronym.]

Anyway, it's not unthinkable that I'll get higher on this list since there is a lot of things to write and link here.
If you're interested in SSIS transformations, and you would like to see short summaries including references to the details, just follow the link.

Monday, February 6, 2012

This property is "A string property that identifies the server collation." according to the documentation.
It is a property which can have a value from the Windows collation list. For those who are familiar only with the SQL engine: Analysis Services supports only Windows collations - no SQL collations are allowed.

How and where it can be set?
In the Language/Collation page of the Analysis Server Properties window:

Analysis Server Properties - Language/Collation page

What happens if the value of this parameter changes?

This change will be applied in the <CollationName> tag of msmdsrv.ini. A change in collation can affect sorting and character comparison. Just for an example, "fruit" and "Fruit" won't be the same if you set a case-sensitive collation (check out this related post of Jamie Thomson).
If you don't specify collation from the client side, then this will be the collation used in the session, which also affects sorting.

Restart needed to apply changes:

No. Your changes are applied immediately.

Category:

N/A. It's a property which is not on the General page.

Default Value:

The value of this property is specified during installation, when Latin1_General_CI_AS is offered by default.

As the official documentation says here, the AllowedBrowsingFolders property is "A string property that defines the names of the folders where logs, backups, and other objects are allowed to be created on the server, in the form of a comma-separated list."

But well, it's a pipe-separated list.

How and where it can be set?
In the General page of the Analysis Server Properties window, after the "Show Advanced (All) Properties" checkbox had been set:

This change will be written into the msmdsrv.ini file, in the <AllowedBrowsingFolders> tag.

What happens if the value of this parameter changes?

For example, when you connect to your instance with SSMS, and add a new database, you will be prompted for the storage location of the new database:

﻿

Analysis Services New Database dialog

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿When you click the ellipsis button﻿, a list will appear where you can select the location of the new Analysis Services database:

Browse for Remote Folder dialog

The AllowedBrowsingFolders property controls this list, so only items defined in the Analysis Services Properties window at this property can be seen here.

Restart needed to apply changes:

No. Your changes are applied immediately.

Category:

Advanced

Default Value:

"\data". This is a relative path to your Analyis Services installation folder.