In one case it is when using Excel to connect to a workbook:

The reason you get this error is that the version independent progid for MSOLAP is [...]]]> I should have posted something on this a long time ago as it is a common error that people experience. This error shows up in two different scenarios.

In one case it is when using Excel to connect to a workbook:

The reason you get this error is that the version independent progid for MSOLAP is set to MSOLAP.4 (SQL 2008) (MSOLAP is the oledb library for Analysis Services also sometimes referred to as ASOLEDB). This happens usually for 1 of 2 reasons:

1) You never installed the newer libraries or

2) You installed them but after installing them, you installed Office 2010 (or some other product which brings with it the 2008 libraries). There was a bug in 2008 libraries that would incorrectly overwrite the version independent progid even if it was at a later version (ie MSOLAP.5).

The other time you might see this error is in a ULS log after getting a ubiquitous error about failing to connect to external connection ‘Data’ in XLViewer (Excel Service UI page). This is caused by the same issue:

1) You never installed the libraries (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210608.aspx) on the ECS box (you have a mutli-machine farm and PowerPivot was not installed on all of the ECS machines)

2) After installing SharePoint (and configuring PowerPivot) you installed Office 2010 on the server which overwrote the version independent progid. This is more common here than in case #1 as people build single box demo machines.

In both cases, you can verify by looking in the registry

If you look at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSOLAP\CurVer you should see MSOLAP.5 (this is SQL 2012). If you see MSOLAP.4, look to see if MSOLAP.5 exists as a registered class (you can see it in the screen shot). If it does, and you want to “fix it quick”, you can simply update the CurVer “(Default)” value and set it to MSOLAP.5 and also update the associated HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSOLAP\CLSID and set it to the same value as HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSOLAP.5\CLSID. Version Independent Progids are just a way to discover the last version of a component when trying to create it (you can read more online if you want). If you don’t have .5 installed or don’t feel comfortable with what I described above, you can simply re-install the SQL 2012 version of MSOLAP (this page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210608.aspx) should have a link on where to install from).

SIDENOTE: SQL Server 2008 R2 was a “dot” release (10.5) and so the version of MSOLAP which shipped with it, 10.5, was still called MSOLAP.4 (and that version supported PowerPivot datasouces). Hence, it is possible your system is working fine with MSOLAP.4 (although I doubt you are reading this blog post if you system is running fine). To feel really confident about what version of MSOLAP.4 is installed on the machine, I always simply look at the version associated with the dll in the Program Files (or Program Files(x86) directory). 10.0.xxxx.x is SQL 2008. 10.5.xxxx.x is SQL 2008 R2. Like I said, I don’t think this really will affect people reading this post, but I add it for information

HTH
Lee

A demo of what’s in the box . . .

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

Nice demo of PowerPivot running on the new BI Appliance

Enjoy!

So what is it? . . . I’ll give [...]]]> Well, it is past midnight, East Coast time, so I can finally, and I mean FINALLY, talk about a new product that Microsoft and HP have been jointly developing for many months now. Welcome to a new PowerPivot world – a world with the first PowerPivot Appliance.

So what is it? . . . I’ll give my take as one of the lead architects of the product. It is PowerPivot-in-a-box. It is PowerPivot on a quality, server-class machine with the following hardware and software:

• Hardware: HP ProLiant DL360 G7 (X5650 processor, 12 cores) with 96GB memory, 8 internal 300GB SFF SAS disks (total 2.4TB raw storage), with support services.
• Software: Windows 2008 R2, SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, and PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010
• During installation, we’ve automated the complete Windows, SharePoint, SQL Server and PowerPivot installations – you answer a few questions and off we go. Come back in a few minutes and you have a complete, tuned, PowerPivot server all up and running. We’ve tailored SharePoint and the SQL RDBMS for the hardware. We’ve tuned the backup and restore facility for the hardware. Everything is ready to go. This makes the provisioning of the machine much more straightforward than if you had purchased the component parts individually and installed them yourself.

Just download and install the PowerPivot for Excel add-in into your Excel 2010 desktop machines, point your browser to the appliance – and off you go.

I don’t normally go for marketing speak, but the IDC white paper explains it best:

“The HP Business Decision Appliance solves many of the challenges commonly associated with implementing BI solutions. For the small-to-medium-sized business that has little to no IT infrastructure, an HP Business Decision Appliance can provide powerful BI functionality without the need to hire an army of consultants to make it ready for use. For larger organizations, an HP Business Decision Appliance can provide a complete production environment for users sooner than IT has the manpower to construct a comparable configuration in piecemeal fashion. Although users are responsible for defining data connections and producing workbooks, IT still has the ability to monitor and manage the overall environment.

For organizations having no prior experience with Microsoft technologies, the HP Business Decision Appliance allows IT to implement a working solution with confidence that the hardware and software will work together correctly from day one. Even when IT has extensive experience with Microsoft, the appliance saves time and costs associated with the design, acquisition, and implementation of a high-performing BI environment.

The HP Business Decision Appliance is beneficial for consultants as well. For many consultants, a proof-of-concept is often the beginning of a long-term relationship with an organization. Even with a proof-of-concept project, consultants often spend the first two days performing installation and configuration tasks that are necessary, but provide no value. By using the appliance, consultants can start building out SharePoint sites and connecting to data sources on the first day of engagement, thereby engaging with the client organization sooner in the process of solution development.

No matter the size of an organization or the level of experience with Microsoft technologies, the HP Business Decision Appliance has a positive impact on the business in several ways:

• IT reduces costs and risks associated with implementation, saving 1-6 months of research and testing.
• Users start integrating and analyzing business data on the first day with minimal IT involvement.
• Users work with familiar Microsoft technologies to create, share, and secure powerful insights.
• IT uses an integrated management dashboard to easily monitor usage and server health.”

http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/2/D/62D06227-FE9F-4256-A187-DD4BC91B2D62/I2A_BI__Paper_SSBI Appliance_final_10Jan.docx

Now is that cool or what? All of this for a single low price from HP. You get the best of all worlds.

Have any questions? What to know the internal details? Feel free to ask them below as comments and I’d be glad to answer them for you.

Enjoy. This is such a cool product.

_-_-_ Dave

Some links:

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technologies/appliances/hp-ssbi.aspx

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/pscmisc/vac/us/en/sm/solutions/business-overview.html

First, PowerPivot is right there on-stage with DataMarket. It is [...]]]> So we finally have a product, the codename “Dallas” product is now announced and shipping (or whatever that means as a cloud-based application). I’ll let you read up on the product itself http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/marketplace/ – what I want to comment on is what it means to PowerPivot.

First, PowerPivot is right there on-stage with DataMarket. It is the primary end-user delivery vehicle for DataMarket data feeds. So much so, take a look at this screen shot of the PowerPivot for Excel download page:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=e081c894-e4ab-42df-8c87-4b99c1f3c49b&displaylang=en

Yup, we have a re-release of the PowerPivot add-in – and with this comes an improved DataMarket flow for getting data.

Here is the old add-in:

After install:

No, there are not any bug fixes, but there is a streamlined access path for loading data from DataMarket:

Notice that it is easier to launch into DataMarket. Within there you can browse existing datasets – and once you find one, we will automatically fill-in the URL if you specify that you want to use it in PowerPivot as your client tool. And we also make it easy for you to fill-in what account to use for accessing it.

WOW! Data feeds on steriods. Now that is geekie . . . Give it a try. DataMarket has many free, no-charge data feeds.

Enjoy!

_-_-_ Dave

So . . . here I am playing around with PowerPivot to get ready for a demo. As this is a group from the SharePoint dev team (actually SharePoint Online), I wanted to include some cool SharePoint functionality [...]]]> Updated 28-Oct-2010: Some folks are reporting that an iisreset is needed to make the updates visible to SharePoint.

So . . . here I am playing around with PowerPivot to get ready for a demo. As this is a group from the SharePoint dev team (actually SharePoint Online), I wanted to include some cool SharePoint functionality into the demo. Trying to be cool and ‘wow’ them, I decide to use a SharePoint list as a data source. I want to show the data mashup capabilities of PowerPivot so I have the bulk of my demo come from the Contoso sample database (the three product catalog tables) and the 4 million row Sales Fact table.

I create my SP list by extracting the 11 distinct manufacturers – and I assign them to a ‘shipper’ that I made up.

When I go to SharePoint an click on:

PowerPivot comes up but it returns an error:

"For security reasons DTD is prohibited in this XML document. To enable DTD processing set the ProhibitDtd property on XmlReaderSettings to false and pass the settings into XmlReader.Create method."

So it turns out that I forgot (it happens to the best of us) to install the ADO.NET Data Services 3.5 SP1, located here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3e102d74-37bf-4c1e-9da6-5175644fe22d

Which I would have known if I had taken my own advice and read BOL beforehand. Read the “New server” installation notes here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210708.aspx#nextsteps

So the moral of the story is: RTFM

After installing ADO.NET Data Services on my SharePoint site, I was able to bring up the data feed in PowerPivot – setup the relationship between the Manufacturer field in the SharePoint list and the Manufacturer field in the Contoso database and I was off and running . . . I also setup daily data refresh job . . . and I could see the Gallery snapshot changing as I entered new data into the SharePoint list . . WOW!

Enjoy!

So I am very sensitive and want to ensure that users become knowledgeable of its ‘quirks’ as well. Here is a good one. [...]]]> I always am on the look out for cool applications that use data feeds. Personally I think that it is by far the most interesting new concept in data interchangeability in many years.

So I am very sensitive and want to ensure that users become knowledgeable of its ‘quirks’ as well. Here is a good one. Recently I had an email sent to me from a user who was reporting that Reporting Services as returning a very difficult error to understand when he used a data feed. The error is:

Unable to obtain schema for data feed ‘<name>’. Please make sure this feed exists.

Here is a screen shot:

To understand the source of the problem, you have to understand how Reporting Services works. In particular, you have to understand how parameters are handled in Reporting Services. Parameters to a report allow you to change how the report is generated. For example, you could have a field called “Department” and then have a list of departments for that field. The end-user can select which departments he or she wants to report on. The problem is that these are passed on the URL to the report. The URL for a Reporting Services report looks something like:

http://<server>/Reporting/_vti_bin/ReportServer?http%3a%2f%2f<name>%2fReporting%2fHiddenReports%2f<name>.rdl&amp;param<name>=<value>;param<name>=<value> . . .

All of the parameters are included in the URL and you will find that they are urlencoded (so they are even longer). Reporting Services (and IE) has a limit of 2048 characters. We’ve seen this problem several times and it is real easy to get into when you have long folder names, are passing many, many parameters, or if the parameters themselves have long values. Interesting, while the PowerPivot import wizard is reporting issues around obtaining the schema, if you dug deeper (with something like a http tracer) you would have seen a WebException “The remote server returned an error: (414) Request-URI Too Long.”

The Url length limit in IE is documented here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427

The only workaround is to modify the report so it takes less parameters or values that shorten the resulting URL, such as using integers instead of long strings, or GUIDs that identify combinations of parameters.

Enjoy!

_-_-_ Dave

So you’ve got a bunch of XML data. How do you get it into PowerPivot? Various ideas: