For your PowerPivot Best Practices, Lessons Learned, and random thoughts!
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on February 3rd, 2010
In scanning through some recent discussions on the PowerPivot forums, I noticed this very nice posting by Marco Russo (http://sqlblog.com/blogs/marco_russo/archive/2010/01/26/memory-considerations-about-powerpivot-for-excel.aspx) . I strongly recommend it.
The only additional point I would like to make is that the RTM version of PowerPivot has an additional check on the in-memory database when saving to disk.
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@hotmail.com), on February 2nd, 2010
The Excel 2010 blog just posted an interesting article on the management aspects of PowerPivot – more of a “Why should I care?” kind of article, see (http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2010/02/01/management-features-of-powerpivot-for-sharepoint.aspx). It shows how PowerPivot helps IT answer:
For those of you who want to know the timeline of the commentary by @PowerPivotPro and @dennylee on cube formulas and named sets. Rob started the process with his excellent introductions:
Then @dennylee innocently created a three-part posting on how to create filtered by Top 10 reports:
which was quickly responded to and openly challenged by @PowerPivotPro
Solid punches were given and mayhem ensued, but @dennylee got his footing back and wreaked havoc via pile driver!
Perhaps more mayhem will ensue – perhaps not. And in fact – it did with a great entry from Rob:
So the feud is over…we think! Either way, you have to admit its sort of dorky, eh?! 
Just in case you’re not already aware of this, some of great contributors to the PowerPivot community are now adding and moderating to the Great PowerPivot FAQ. Please check it out and email us your questions as well!
Enjoy!
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on December 2nd, 2009
From time to time I hear questions and comments from folks questioning why they should purchase the server-side component for PowerPivot. After all, the client software is free (with a Office 2010 Professional license). Why spend the money to invest in the server pieces . . . And because it requires a SQL Server Enterprise Edition license, it can get costly.
Having spent 3+ years of my life developing this product, naturally I have a fair amount of passion around this topic. The following is my own personal reasons; my own personal goals for the software and why I believe PowerPivot is such a pivotal (pun intended) component in a company’s BI strategy. This is not marketing and I apologize up front for it. So here goes:
What is the value-add for PowerPivot for SharePoint?
By powerpivotgeek (dwickert@microsoft.com), on November 25th, 2009
From time to time, particular from knowledgeable SharePoint users coming up to speed with PowerPivot, I get the question: “PowerPivot have ‘cross-farm’ support”. As you can see from the title of this post, we don’t support it – and in this “A Peek Inside” I hope to explain why.
First, what is SharePoint ‘cross-farm’ support and why is it important. In large, complex SharePoint configurations a common requirement is to specialize servers or farms of servers to specific services. A good example of this approach is to have a separate farm dedicated to Search. Rather than having each end-user farm host its own Search service, the idea is to get better scale through specialization. Content crawling is done remotely; the indexes are kept remotely; and the Search results are calculated remotely. End users connect to the content farms (so-called because that is where the content is stored), but the content farm reaches out to specialized servers/farms for other services. Example of these services is: Search, Personalization, Business Data Catalog, Portal Usage reporting – coming in SharePoint 2010 are lots more . . .
On a more off the wall note, I just realized that we have a bit of a double take (ha!) here concerning the idea and name “PowerPivot Twins”. The code name for PowerPivot was “Project Gemini”. The name Gemini had been chosen for this project because of its meaning:
Gemini – Gemini (pronounced /ˈgɛmɪnaɪ/, Latin: twins, symbol ♊) is one of the constellations of the zodiac known as “the twins“
Within the BI world, the “twins” are the traditionally conflicting ideas of the Users who are trying to model, analyze, and share the data and the IT Administrators who are trying to provision, administer, and secure the data. With PowerPivot, we are able to unite these “twins” because we are:
But even more interesting than the fact that the “PowerPivot Twins” allows us to pay homage to our “twins” roots within Gemini…even we, the PowerPivot Twins ourselves, pay homage to the idea of these two “twins”.
I, Denny Lee, work for the SQL Customer Advisory Team; in the case of PowerPivot I typically represent the customer – i.e. the Users. Dave Wickert works for the Analysis Services team; in his previous role as an Analysis Services guru and current role as the PowerPivot SharePoint Integration PM, he typically represents the IT Administrator.
So we, the “PowerPivot Twins”, pay homage to Project Gemini not just in reference to our twins roots, but also that we ourselves represent the two equal parts of the BI twins.
Just food for thought (or perhaps I just need more sleep)
Want to know more about Dave Wickert’s thoughts on the Forrester report “10 strong hints your enterprise may not have a BI strategy“; I think you can figure out the direction of his thoughts just with the title of his blog post below 
“BI strategy? We don’t need no stink’en BI strategy!”.
As for the PowerPivot perspective in all of this, I was all ready to start chiming in about it and realized it would be significantly easier for me – and much easier for you (to read) to read Rob Collie’s blog:
Forrester Top 10 – The View From PowerPivot
Enjoy!
