One area Reporting Services falls down a bit is in the parameter selection process for the built-in Report Manager and integrated modes. Usually this involves building custom parameter web parts or asp.net portals to get around. There are some workarounds for issues related to multi-value parameters and the infamous ‘Select All’ checkbox that may help if your database is getting clobbered.
Multi-Value (Select All) parameter in Reporting Services | Microsoft Connect
Is Reporting Services going the way of the dodo, to be replaced by Power View (Project Crescent?)
No.
Comparing Power View, Report Builder, and Report Designer
Power View won’t replace the existing Reporting Services reporting products.
Report Designer is a sophisticated design environment that developers and IT pros can use for embedded reporting in their applications. In Report Designer they can create operational reports, shared data sources, and shared datasets, and author report viewer controls.
In Report Builder, IT pros and power users can create powerful operational reports, and reusable report parts and shared datasets.
Report Builder and Report Designer create RDL reports; Power View creates RDLX reports. Power View cannot open RDL reports, and vice versa.
Both Report Designer and Report Builder are shipping in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Release Candidate 0 (RC 0) Reporting Services, along with Power View. For more information, see Tools (SSRS).
SQL Server Reporting Services Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
It is interesting that Microsoft is launching tools like PowerPivot and Power View, knowing that they will cannibalize their existing Analysis Services and Reporting Services products and roadmaps for future installations.
My question is, why don’t they just go all-in and build out these tools as replacements, instead of diverging paths? Why not incorporate all the best features of Power View into Report Builder, and leverage the RDL language that is designed for reporting?
Same goes for Analysis Services and PowerPivot. Why have two separate servers for each product? What is the value (other than licensing) of splitting up these technologies into 2 siloed environments? The sum of the parts is much better than the individual.
Still looking for some cohesion and sense of direction for the future of SQL Server reporting and BI tools… and hoping for a better 2012.
A deployment checklist for the new Denali / SQL 2012 tools
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh231687(v=sql.110).aspx
The Swiss Army knife of Reporting Services tools. From two men who both aren’t from Switzerland. I’m not really sure what it doesn’t do.
SQL-RD is a Business Intelligence application for windows that saves time and money by making it easy to define single or packages of Microsoft® SQL Reporting Services reports, schedule and run them automatically, and send the reports to print, fax, disk, ftp, sms or email in a number of standard formats.
Day 23: Tips from Technoblab for Report Header/Footer, format codes, customizing the toolbar, working with images, etc
Lots of nice code examples here
A database field can neither be placed in a report header nor in the footer. This will throw an error "The Value expression for the textbox <fieldname> refers to a field. Fields cannot be used in page headers or footers".
There is however a workaround. Place a hidden textbox in the report body call it tb_hidden and assign to this the database field that you need in the header. Place a textbox in the report header and assign the hidden textbox's value to it
ex: =reportitems!tb_hidden.Value
This however as a drawback, the value will appear only in the first page. If your report runs into many pages then you need to take a different approach.
Pass the value to appear in the header as a parameter from your .aspx page call it database_field. Assign this to the textbox in the header.
ex: =Parameters!database_field.Value
Day 22: Auto-caching and logging of SQL RS parameters
The solution tracks the selected parameters from a report execution and uses them later for the next execution to take them as default parameters. This enables users to log parameters and inspect the execution statistics of reports as well as caching former execution parameters.
Excellent article with how to filter distinct values from a list using SSRS and Sharepoint.
Using SharePoint List data for Reporting Services (SSRS) parameter source « Dan English's BI Blog
Day 21 was probably part of Day 20 too. Still worth a mention. Code Generator for SQL RS reports
SSIS Task for SQL Server 2008 to create server reports or local reports from a recordset data source.
Day 20: An aggregator of all the SSIS components on Codeplex and elsewhere
Anything and everything you ever need to do with SSIS is somewhere on this page. Includes some Reporting Services functionality too.
This is a community project for developing additional tasks and components for SSIS, and identifying other CodePlex projects that do the same. 51 Integration Services extensibility projects exist on CodePlex - find them and over a hundred more from around the 'net right here.
Day 17, 18, and 19: Whatever you want to do with SQL is somewhere in these samples…
Microsoft SQL Server Community Projects & Samples
Day 16: One of the more useful tools out there – integration of Reporting Services with SSMS for exporting table data to a report!
Because the import/export wizard sucks.
SQLReporter enable you exporting table or view to Reporting Services Report , Then , you can export it to Excel & PDF. Quick & nice.
SQL Injection attacks are probably the most common attacks on internet-facing SQL Servers due to their ease of use. This tool helps expose vulnerabilities to end-users and non-IT executives, visually.
The reasoning is that most existing SQL Injection testing tools are executed from a command line and “lack an intuitive user interface”. In other words, if you can’t show the problem in a pretty web page, people won’t really believe it exists.
Day 15: Leech for Reporting Services
SSRS downloader is a tool to download all report files from a folder from Reporting Services at once. It uses reportservice2005.asmx endpoint web service to do this.
Day 15: Amazon SimpleDB query extension for your cloud computing needs
If you’d like to tell your manager you’re running reports “off the cloud”, here’s one way to do it.
http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/
This project is a SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 data processing extension that facilitates querying of Amazon's SimpleDB.
Day 14: A Powershell provider for SSRS
Doesn’t look too current but probably still works…
A PowerShell provider for SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services). The provider allows for navigation of SSRS installations, management of reports, etc, all through a scriptable interface.
Day 13: Self-service documentation
These are reports for MS SQL Management Studio and MS SQL Reporting Services for creation of database documentation with the use of descriptions from Extended Properties.
Reports contain the detailed information on tables, views and stored procedures etc. Use of reports engine allows exporting generated reports into Excel, Word, PDF etc. formats easily.
Skipping the weekend again.
Day 12: The unfortunately-named sperm report project, blowing out data from OLAP cubes with “Spermline visualization”
Essentially with these four reports you can create 400 user reports (actually as many as you like) Change what is displayed on rows, columns, filter or time by simply creating a new "linked report" and setting a new set of paramaters.
Day 9: An automated build tool for SQL RS
RSBuild is a deployment tool for SQL Server Reporting Service. It currently supports two types of tasks: executing SQL Server scripts and publishing SQL Server Reporting Service reports and shared data sources. From version 1.1.0 onwards SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services is supported as well as all previously supported versions of SQL Server Reporting Services.
Day 9: Auditing in SQL from the SQLCat team (and Denny Lee)
This project is a place for the SQL CAT team to share their expertise with the community and collaborate with other community members outside Microsoft who wish to contribute code samples to enable more productive use of the SQL Server platform for high-scale,enterprise customers
Day 8: RSToolKit, a tool for creating, moving, documenting, and exporting reports.
This could be very useful in a distributed, farm or DRP environment.
RSToolKit allows users to administrate different SQL Server Reporting Services with one application and has different methods to deploy reports. It supports all SQL Server Reporting Services versions which are using the ReportService2005 and the ReportExecution2005 SOAP API
Day 7: A framework for navigating an Analysis Services cube from SSRS
Basically the user-friendliness of the interface is achieved by allowing users to drill up/down on the different hierarchies by simply clicking columns or rows, and applying filters by clicking on icons in rows or columns.
The performance is achieved by only retrieving the necessary data from the cube.
Day 6 – A debugger for Reporting Services
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to peek under the hood and see what APIs Report Manager or a custom application calls? This is exactly what the Reporting Services Tracer (RsTracer) sample was designed to handle. RsTracer intercepts the server calls and outputs them to a trace listener, such as the Microsoft DebugView for Windows. RsTracer helps you see the APIs that a Reporting Services client invokes and what arguments it passes to each interface. It also intercepts the server response. Armed with this information, you can easily reproduce the same feature in your custom management application.
And a utility mentioned above from my favourite Windows utility guy Mark Russinovich
Day 5 (sorry I skipped the weekend) – Report Generator for Integration Services ETL
As the name says it, this "Control Flow" custom component can be used render your SQL Server Reporting Services in files withe the following formats: PDF, Word, Excel, HTML 4.0, MHTML, CSV, XML
Day 2 – SSRS Buddy
A quick fix to upload multiple report definitions to Reporting Services.
SSRSBuddy enables deployment of multiple reports and report models onto a SSRS2005 instance, using shared datasources
Here’s to a start of 25 days of Reporting Services tools from Codeplex
Day 1 – The Metadata Toolkit
SQL Server Metadata Toolkit
MSDN's SQL 2005 tool kit updated to 2008 for managing metadata in SQL Server Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services using built-in features including data lineage, business and technical metadata and impact analysis.
A complement to the upgrade adviser and best practices analyzer.
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Scalability Experts, has announced availability of its Upgrade Assistant for SQL Server 2012 (UAFS) tool. As reported on ASP Free, with the UAFS tool, users can automate the process of application compatibility testing to determine any issues that may arise from upgrading to SQL Server 2012 from SQL Server 2008.
SQL Server 2012 RC0 was put out a couple of weeks ago. It includes a tool called PowerPivot, which Microsoft is touting as the replacement (ahem, augmentation) for Analysis Services cubes.
(The) shiny features of PowerPivot V2, which are:
- Hierarchies
- KPIs
- Security
- Perspectives
- Sort-by-Column
- Measure-definition through PowerPivot window
- Data view
- New DAX-functions
SQL Server 2012 RC0 and PowerPivot V2 RC0 - Blogs
PowerPivot removes some of the complexity and design decisions from a developer and places them in the hands of an end-user. Pulling in data from various cloud, relational (and cube) sources, the PowerPivot add-in for Excel 2010 (now 2012?) builds an Analysis Services cube in the background. The cube is stored in-memory (or perhaps paged to disk, but still in-memory technically), until it is saved to disk as an XLSX zip file with an ABF Analysis Services Vertipaq-style backup inside.
Before Analysis Services, Pivot tables were something mainly power Excel users dealt with. Analysis Services started bringing Pivot tables to the foreground, with all of their limitations. Corporate users looked to 3rd-party tools for cube browsing, until IT budgets were cut and Excel became “good enough”.
As users needed more data in their pivot tables, they had to find the 1 person in the company with knowledge of these “cubes”, and bring with them budget to change the corporate data structure. Now they need to find one of the 10 users in their company who are power Excel gurus and know about this thing called Powerpivot.
It will be interesting to see what happens when PowerPivot is truly embedded in Excel, without the add-in feel.
