PowerPivot Twins! » Internals

PowerPivot Technical Architecture Diagram Released: Security Architecture

dennyglee — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:40:13 +0000

Because PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint involves so many components from SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010, this poster provides an end-to-end view of the PowerPivot Security Architecture in one view. This view includes nearly all of the logical security surface areas and illustrates how these systems interact.

Included in this diagram are:

Service Accounts
SharePoint Databases
Security Hardening
Automatic Data Refresh
User Identity Flow
PowerPivot Permissions Levels

Please click through to continue reading: PowerPivot Technical Architecture Diagram

Filed under: Internals, Perspectives Tagged: Configuration, Connectivity, Excel, Excel Services, Security, SharePoint

How much data can I load into PowerPivot?

dennyglee — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:56:59 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on August 22nd, 2010

Recently a question has come up on one of the forums about the number of rows that PowerPivot can load. Clearly PowerPivot can hold a lot – just look at our demos. Millions and millions . . ah . . but how many millions?

The key geek ‘magic’ is the Vertipaq engine. The in-memory Vertipaq engine has an extensive array of techniques that it uses for compressing and manipulating the data. Being an in-memory database system means that the more data that we can get in . . the more data we can scan . . the more kinds of applications that we can solve. So compression is a HUGE deal for us.

Please click through to continue reading: How much data can I load into PowerPivot?

Filed under: Configuration, Internals Tagged: Database, FAQ, SharePoint

Help, my PowerPivot for SharePoint Lists Atom Feed has fallen and it can’t get up!

dennyglee — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 06:40:39 +0000

August 21, 2010 by dennyglee

One of the cool things with PowerPivot is to click on an SharePoint List’s Export as Data Feed (i.e. an ATOM feed) and its data can be imported directly into a PowerPivot for Excel workbook. To get this thing to work, one of the key things that I remind people regularly is to make sure you install ADO.NET Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

So after doing this multiple times, I proceeded to do my usual atom feed import like I usually do:

Please click through to continue reading Help, my PowerPivot for SharePoint Lists Atom Feed has fallen and it can’t get up!

Filed under: Configuration, Internals Tagged: Configuration, SharePoint, Troubleshooting

Howto: Get more flexibility when importing data from text files

dennyglee — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:20:23 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on August 18th, 2010

Question: By default PowerPivot has two limitations when working with text files (using the Office ACE OLE DB provider): (1) will only import data from files with an extension of .txt, .tab, and .csv; and (2) it will only recognize tab, comma, semicolon, space, colon, and vertical bar and column delimiters. Is there a way to change PowerPivot’s configuration so that it will recognize other file extensions or column delimiters?

To continue reading, please click through to Howto: Get more flexibility when importing data from text files

Filed under: Configuration, Internals Tagged: Data Source, Import

PowerPivot Technical Diagram: PowerPivot Security Architecture

dennyglee — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:17:53 +0000

Just in case you didn’t already know, we just uploaded the PowerPivot Security Architecture technical diagram on to sqlcat.com / MSDN. To get access to the PDF, XPS, and/or VSD files, please click through to: http://sqlcat.com/whitepapers/archive/2010/08/17/powerpivot-technical-diagram-powerpivot-security-architecture.aspx

Enjoy!

[Note, this is cross posted from dennyglee.com in its entirety]

Filed under: Configuration, Internals Tagged: Configuration, Connectivity, Excel, Excel Services, Security, Troubleshooting

Working with the 2010 Office ACE provider

dennyglee — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:13:29 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on August 18th, 2010

Ok. I’ve promised some best practices – here is my first one.

What is the 2010 Office ACE provider and why is this important to PowerPivot? The 2010 Office System Driver for Data Connectivity Components (aka the Office ACE provider) is a OLE DB provider that can be used to read data from and write data to Office 2010 system files such as Microsoft Access Beta (mdb and accdb) files and Microsoft Excel 2010 (xls, xlsx, and xlsb) files. You can also use it to access text files.

Click through to continue reading Working with the 2010 Office ACE provider

Filed under: Configuration, Internals Tagged: ACE, FAQ, SharePoint

What is a “snapshot” when you enable client-side tracing

dennyglee — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:56:26 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@hotmail.com), on August 2nd, 2010

In getting ready for a recent internal presentation on PowerPivot, I was asked what this button actually does . . . (see below)

The primary purpose for the settings page is to setup diagnostic tracing.

Continue Reading: What is a “snapshot” when you enable client-side tracing

Filed under: Configuration, Internals Tagged: Troubleshooting

Incoming emails to a PowerPivot Gallery

dennyglee — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:47:46 +0000

From time to time you run into something on SharePoint that is a known SharePoint ‘issue’, but you wouldn’t necessarily see PowerPivot being impacted. After all SharePoint is this huge juggernaut of a product and PowerPivot is just this one small little app in the corner. Well, here is one that I ran into today. We had a bug report that the incoming email setup for a PowerPivot Gallery was missing the ‘incoming emails’ link –> after some searching, I found this interesting posting:

Click through to continue reading.

Filed under: Internals Tagged: SharePoint, Troubleshooting

PowerPivot, you are so insensitive! (case that is)

dennyglee — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:02:06 +0000

June 18, 2010 by dennyglee

Working with my compatriots Ayad Shammout (@aashammout) and Peter Myers, we had found out that PowerPivot at times can be really insensitive…in terms of case that is. That is by default, the collation for PowerPivot is case-insensitive.

For example, if you import the table below:

Continue reading: PowerPivot, you are so insensitive! (case that is)

Filed under: Internals, Perspectives Tagged: Connectivity, Data Source, Excel

Why is allocation always selecting the same machine?

dennyglee — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 06:58:07 +0000

By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on June 14th, 2010

If you are running PowerPivot for SharePoint on more than one backend app server, then it is a common issue that folks are seeing only one server being used. It turns out that this might be ‘by-design’ so let’s talk about it for a bit. Let’s look at the two allocation methods we support:

Round-Robin
Health-Based

Please click to continue reading.

Filed under: Configuration, Internals Tagged: Configuration, Load Balancing, SharePoint