Welcome to Salvo(z)

I am working on building a tabular cube and needed the ability to compare current fiscal year dates to prior fiscal year dates by matching the dates based on the same fiscal month and day of month and then performing calculations to compare sales between the current and prior fiscal year.  The built-in DAX date calculations didn’t appear to meet my needs (at least I wasn’t able to obtain the desired results using them), so I implemented the necessary behavior using an inactive relationship from my date dimension to the sales fact table.

During the past 6 months, I’ve been working on re-designing an app that uses BCP to move data from thousands of similar (but not identical) databases each storing sales and other related data for individual bicycle dealers into a unified database on an Azure Virtual Machine (currently a D13 VM with 8 core, 56 GB and SSD) that stores the data for all dealers.  The overall unified database is roughly 500 GB in size and is reloaded on a weekly basis, so the movement and loading of data needed to be optimized as much as possible.

Log4Net is a robust logging framework that provides programmers granular control over logging to a variety of target outputs (examples include file, console, email, etc.).  Detailed documentation can be found on the Apache Log4Net site.

Azure Virtual Machines, have always had a local non-persistent disk attached to them, with the size of this disk varies with the size of the VM. In the lead up to the release of the D-Series VMs, the performance of the local disk on the original A-Series has been, in my opinion throttled in order for the D-Series to be marketed more effectively. In the graph below, you can see my personal IOPs benchmarks for the Azure local disk. Performance steadily increased, before dropping off sharply this fall with the D-Series showing the same performance which was once available on the A-Series.

There are several blog posts, technet articles and Server Fault posts about installing .net 3.5 on Windows 8 and Server 2012/R2. The gist of it, is that you use the command line tool dism, with the /Source switch to specify the path to the SXS folder from the installation media used. Here is an example of the dism command: