PerformancePoint Server 2007 Training

The last week I had the opportunity to attend to a PerformancePoint Server 2007training, performed by the MVPs of Solid Quality Mentors Spain.

The experience (3 full days of theory and labs) was pretty exciting. I could learn the power of the Monitoring Dashboards, and the sophisticated engine implemented by MS in the Planning infrastructure.

But there is a quite large list of constraints that we should take into account when we're planning to implement a project with this software. Here we have some samples:

- It is not possible to reuse an existing Staging database, we're forced to use its own.
- It is not possible to reuse an existing Time Dimension, we'll have to build a new one via the business modeler.
- The tools provided by PerformancePoint Server to program the solution doesn't allow us to use any Source Code Control (neither VSS nor TFS).

Despite this several constraints, that I hope and supose that in the next versions of the software will disapear, the product have plenty of advantages. Thus, I'm excited to get involved into a PerformancePoint BI project. I hope this will happen soon.

Datetime transformation with SSIS

After doing a lot of failed transformation with some date columns in SSIS, with a very poor manually entered source data, I'll find the definitive solution to the datetime transformations from string.

I have included a script component into the dataflow to perform the transformation, with the following code:

Try
Row.ConvertedDate = DateTime.Parse(Row.Date.Substring(0, 2) + "/" + Row.Date.Substring(2, 2) + "/" + Row.Date.Substring(4, 4))
Catch
Row.ConvertedDates = DateTime.MinValue
End Try

With that approach you have the abbility of perform some advanced transformations in the Catch statement.