Today we release a new version of our best practise checker. Version 1.1 now checks for 28 best practises, nearly ten times more than the previous release. To give a bit of an impresion, we mention a few of the tests:

• Are you using the most efficient SQL Server data provider?
• Do your attributes have appropriate keys?
• Are you using OrderBy and UnkownMember appropriately? The default settings are not always the best setting for these properties...
• Are your hierarchies designed in a propper way?
• Did you put distinct counts in separate measure groups?
• Are your partitions reasonable in size?
• Did you design reasonable aggregates?

We also improved the user interface.

You can export the detected violations into comma separated value (csv) or xml format, and import them later in the tool. Very handy to upload the information in Excel or a relational database. You can also generate reports on the detected violations. These reports can be viewed on-screen or exported to Excel or pdf.

A new option is to annotate a best practise violation. You can also mark a violation as 'Ignore': like most best practises, sometimes you might have good reasons to ignore a violation: the exceptions to the rules... It is also possible to include multiple databases and historical checks in a single analysis.

As you see, a lot of improvements. To download this tool, check our website.

Nico