Quick Guide to BIDS Helper 1.4.3.0 for SSAS

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BIDS Helper is an amazing free add-in for Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS). You can obtain the add-in from the Codeplex website. The purpose of this posting is to provide a quick guide to version 1.4.3.0 Analysis Services (SSAS) functions. The add-in also has other functions, but this post only lists the context-sensitive SSAS features.

I believe this organization structure will encourage people to explore this product. Setup is through a regular setup menu, but the actual features visually appear in context-senstive areas throughout BIDS:

BIDS Configuration — Tips for setup
BIDS Helper — Features by Hierarchy: Keyed to the BIDS environment for SSAS, with links to the BIDS Helper website
BIDS Helper — Features by Hierarchy (Visual): What to look for on the screen

BIDS Configuration

After installation, BIDS helper adds itself to many of the BIDS menus. Configuration is through the tools menu.

The menu defaults to the “Features” pane, and allows you to enable or disable features of BIDS Helper. “Disabling” means that the item would not appear on a menu, though anyone could turn the feature on again by using the Options menu. Also, note that this list of features does not correspond completely to the features list from the Codeplex website (but it mostly does). Operationally, I keep all the features active.

The preferences pane is the area where I believe most users would be likely to make adjustments. In my case TFS (Team Foundation Server) and VSS (Visual Source Safe) are not installed for the SmartDiff feature.

I tried changing the Custom Diff line to use Notepad++, and while Smart Diff did open the program, the comparison highlighting did not work. If you are not using Notepad++ then you should be, click here to obtain it. This open-source program has a number of add-ins available including a Compare add-in. I used to pin Micosoft’s Notepad to my start menu, but I now pin Notepad++.

Microsoft makes Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Explorer available on the MSDN Downloads, and that’s the version I would use since I have SQL Server 2008 R2 on my system (same for SQL Sever 2008).

The version pane provides the version, notifies you if the version is current, and shows a link to the website (no need to bookmark it).

The BIDS Helper website provides an alphabetical listing of features. However, I believe a better organization is from where you access these features. My list below categorizes the features by area, and the links directly access the Codeplex website for more details. Note that this project is open source, and the developers are not paid to make this product. Thus, some of the screen shots on their website were made at different times, and may not match all the latest features as they might show on your installation. Nevertheless, their descriptions and explanations are current for this version release 1.4.3.0.

BIDS Helper — Features by Hierarchy

Analysis Services Database