Issue Installing SSDT-BI 2013 on Windows 10

So, a week ago, once the initial excitement of having Windows 10 had died down, and the reality of re-installing all of my applications on my PC had dawned, I was busy doing just that. After having installed SQL Server 2014, I turned to SSDT-BI 2013 (SQL Server Data Tools – Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2013). The installation went smooth right until the end, then it failed with the following error:

SSDT-BI 2013 Error on Windows 10

 I tried again after removing everything else that had gotten installed with the setup, and downloaded a fresh copy of SSDT-BI 2013, just to make sure that my previous copy was not corrupted — Same issue this time round too. I was sure this never happened on Windows 8.

The error looks like it was missing something. Something that this Visual Studio 2013 shell did not have as a prerequisite.

The Solution

I did not want to spend time looking for the exact problem was, but since I had Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate, I tried installing it with the bare minimum, and then tried installing SSDT-BI 2013. And it worked this time.

It would be nice to know if anyone could figure out what exactly was missing for SSDT-BI to fail.

 

Doing the Forbidden: Fixing Cubes and Dimensions on Production et al.

Okay, now this could be a completely nuh-uh topic. But in the real world these things can and do happen. Example: There is this cube developed a couple of years ago, deployed on various environments such as QA, UAT, Production etc. Then something goes wrong when some new dimension data has text that is longer than what the field allows – ETL fails. You figure it is a small change to the dimension table: field QuarterName on table DimDate needs to be varchar(15) instead of the varchar(9) that it is. So you go fix it directly on the database – Big mistake when it comes to ALM etc. However, the ETL works. But, when you process the dimension on SSAS you get an error:

Errors in the back-end database access module. The size specified for a binding was too small, resulting in one or more column values being truncated. Errors in the OLAP storage engine.