Using BAM In BizTalk Server 2006 With SQL Server 2005

If you are trying to do Business Activity Monitoring using BizTalk Server 2006 Beta 1, and, SQL Server 2005, you may run into the same issue that I did. You'll probably notice that when you walk through the Configuration Manager, you cannot create the Analysis database if you are using SQL Server 2005. Beta 1 doesn't support Yukon Analysis Services yet.

You may not notice a problem until you try and deploy BAM configurations. When I tried to do so, I got a message saying Deploying View ... ERROR: BAM Deployment failed, then BAM Star Schema database has not been configured. Please run bm.exe setup-databases to configure the database. Since I'm not able to create the StarSchemaDb via the Configuration Manager (because of the aforementioned Analysis Services issue), how do you get past this? If you look at the XML that you export out of the BAM Excel spreadsheet, you'll notice an element CreateOlapCube which is set to true. This is what caused my failure. So, just flip that to false, and re-run the bm.exe deploy-all command. Now all the needed bits get built and after applying a tracking profile, I can record data and view it in my shiny new BAM portal. So, for now with Beta 1, you won't have the OLAP aggregation features if you're using SQL 2005.