Monday, October 26, 2009

Add-ons no MS Business Intelligence Developer should be without

The main two applications that are used for Microsoft-centric development are Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). There are a few add-on utilities that increase the power and usefulness of the out of the box applications. I find these invaluable:






  • MDXStudio - the brilliant Mosha Pasumansky's take on how MDX development should take place. Tons of functionality. Worth the download if you only use it to format your MDX (but check out the other capabilities, too):
  • BIDSHelper - An add-in for BIDS that provides great capabilities for validating dimensions, seeing which SSIS objects are affected by configurations, and much more. There are versions for both SQL 2005 and SQL 2008
  • SSMS Tools Pack - (Thanks to Steve for showing me this one) Best features I've used so far are:
    • Window Connection Coloring
    • Query Execution History and Current Window History
    • Generate Insert statements from tables

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