I have some really exciting news about our software and our products. From now until the end of April 2011, if you purchase any of our software, you will get 1 free seat in either our SSRS class or our SSIS class. Each of our classes is 4 days long, 3 hours a day. Here are the options that you have from our suite of products: This tool will plug in with your BIDS environment and will give you the capability of adding Auditing and Notification Framework, Deployment, Monitoring, Snippets, Package ...
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Today in class I was asked a very interesting question. One of the attendees asked if SSRS 2008 was limited to a specific number of drill through's in a report. At the time, I created a report, that enabled the end user to click on the Reseller Name and go to a reseller detailed report. The second drill through I created was in the reseller detailed report. When you clicked on Product Name, it would take you to a product detailed report. I was not aware of any limitation on the drill through act...
Welcome to SQLSaturday #74 SQLSaturday is a training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server. This event will be held Apr 30 2011 at Jacksonville, FL. Admittance to this event is free, all costs are covered by donations and sponsorships. Please register soon as seating is limited, and let friends and colleages know about the event. Why : It is a great opportunity to learn from Microsoft MVPs, SQL Server authors, and professionals who have been through and c...
It is often the common misconception that if you right click on the top left corner of your tablix and select tablix properties or even right click on the grey box to that is left of all the column names: Then select options for repeat header rows on each page or keep header visible while scrolling , that it will in fact do just that. Ah ah ah, not so fast. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. What you need to do is click on the column row: Then you need to is click on the black upside down triang...
Event Location Event Date: 3/19/2011 Description: Midlands Technical College - Airport Campus, West Columbia, SC Recommended Hotel Country Inn & Suites (803) 794-6200 or Holliday Inn & Suites (803) 391-4000. After Event Party Event Date: 3/19/2011 Description: To be announced Hey everybody, time to have an overnight get away in Columbia, South Carolina. While you may pay to get to the event, all the training you receive that day is FREE!!!!! You will here from experts like Brian McDonald...
Rock Your Reports I am really excited to announce that on Thursday, March 10th at 11 a.m. (EST), I will be presenting on Sql Server Reporting Services. Last month I did a presentation on the Introduction to the Reporting Services environment. We talked about the purpose of the shared data sources, some expressions were created as well as an Action to drill through to websites and other reports. Now that we are familiar with the environment, lets learn how to make a report "rockin" by adding some...
As some of you may know, I work for Pragmatic Works. Not only are we already an awesome company to work for, but something else that is pretty fantastic is give away a free week of BI training. This training is given to people who have served in the military and to people who have faced some kind of hardship like unemployment due to the suffering economy. Today is Thursday and we only have one more day left out of our week long training. The students began the week with learning TSQL, took those...
Intro to Sql Server Reporting Services 2008 Webinar On February 10th, I presented an Intro session for Reporting Services 2008. We had a great turnout with more than 330 people present. Some of the items that we learned about was: 1. Solutions can hold multiple projects like SSAS, SSIS, SSRS 2. Creating a shared data source 3. Having objects embedded in the report 4. Creating Actions on objects to go to another report or url 5. Formatting numbers, colors, alignment, etc. One of the other things ...
Yesterday I created just the shell of a database and we'll call it Generic1 and then I did a restore to populate that Generic1. Today, I needed to delete that Generic1, create a new database called Generic2 and do a restore to that. At the time, I had BIDS opened along with some reports that used Generic1 as a Shared Data Source. I right clicked on Generic1 and chose Delete. I received an error stating that the database was in use. I went back into BIDS, deleted my shared data source and assumed...
I am incredibly excited to announce that I have submitted for a session for 24 Hours of Pass. Now all I need is your vote. My session (if approved) will cover an Introduction to Reporting Services. We will learn the basic functionality of SSRS 2008 as well as some of the newer features of R2. You will learn how to take a basic report and add cool graphical representation of your company's data. There are a lot of big names that I am running up against and the odds are against me, but everybody h...
It has been just over a month since I wrote the article Introduction to SSRS Report Writing Part 1. I wanted to follow-up that article with a blog to show you how to write an expression on how to alternate the colors in your report. Now, if you are new to report writing, then please refer to my article Introduction to SSRS Report Writing Part 1 . 1. Click on the details row of your table in the Design Page. 2. Click on the Properties Tab and then click on the Background Color and then click the ...
I am very excited to announce that Pragmatic Works Foundation is offering another week of FREE Business Intelligence Training. This is an entire week training from 8am - 5pm. Starting February 28th - March 4th. There is an interview and application process that you must go through. Seating is limited. If you are interested in being considered, please click here: http://pragmaticworks.com/foundation . The deadline for submitting applications is February 7th. We look forward to seeing you particip...
In today's blog, I wanted to share information on the Lookup Task. It is a great task because it will take your data Join it together, similar to what a Join does in TSQL. When you pull out the task in the Data Flow, you will need to connect it to an existing task. In the example below, I have directed data to be sent from the condition split to the Lookup. Once inside the Lookup Task, you will need to set a couple of the General settings. Here you will need to decide if you want to select Full,...
The Data Validation task deals with a lot of expressions for when you are trying to clean the data that you are inserting. Instead of writing out all the expressions that you need for your package in SSIS, you can use the Data Validation Task to do that for you. If you are working with data that has social security numbers, phone numbers, emails, dates, etc. you will be able to format it. Below are the options (expressions) that come standard with the task : The Input Columns are populated with ...
The Pragmatic Works Foundation was created to find passionate people who are interested in joining the technology field but cannot make the financial investments needed for training and hardware. Working with our job placement partners our goal is to place all candidates who complete training with a new career in technology. What does it involve? After submitting a personal profile to be considered, qualified candidates will be selected to attend an orientation. The purpose of the orientation is...
I was working on a package that would need the date appended to a .csv file. My source was from two csv files and my destination was to a brand new csv file. To append the date, I needed to create an expresion. My file name and file path wer both in a variable. I tried a couple of times on my own with no success. I keep misplacing my \\, then didn't put my double"" in the right places. I was getting pretty frustrated, but here is how I figured it out. I did an internet search on appending dates ...
A quick view of common SSAS Definitions: I used the definitions from the Microsoft's website and added the images to it.
The other day while working at a client site, we were creating SSIS packages that would execute using TSQL in order to load a database. We wanted to eliminate having a bunch of different shared data sources and then having to create configuration files for each of the data sources. The reason being is that we created a database (we'll call it Database B) in SSMS that was housing just the stored procedures. Those stored procedures were being called on by Database A (existing database) to load ano...
We all know about the Control Flow tasks for the three containers (For Loop Container, Foreach Loop Container and Sequence Container): Are you aware that there is a 4th container that you can't see in the list of tasks? It is called the Grouping Container. What you see below is some script tasks that I have pulled out to my control flow. If you would like to put them into a Grouping Container, all you would have to do is highlight those tasks: Then Right Click and select Group. This is great for...
Below is an example of creating a table and setting it up to automatically generate a unique identity for each record entered. The first column is the CustomerID. In between the parenthesis you see (1,1). We are setting up the first record entered to start off with a CustomerID of 1. We are also saying that every recorded entered after that should have a CustomerID that increments by 1. So, obviously the next record that gets entered will be 2, then 3, so on and so forth. We now are adding recor...
I am excited to announce that I will get the opportunity to present a Mini Session at the next SQL Saturday in Orlando on October 16th at 1:15pm. I will be presenting a tool (BI Documenter) that documents your major SQL Server components and the "entire" BI stack. Your team can now view historical data from SQL Server Databases, Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services in a format that is easy to navigate and understand. See a visual snapshot of your environment that includ...
When creating a report, it's nice to add color to it, especially when attempting to separate the rows. Here is a quick how to for you: 1. After you create your report, highlight one of your rows: 2. Go to your properties window, find the Background Color field and click the drop down box: 3. Click the Expressions link at the bottom: 4. In the Expressions box type: =IIF(ROWNUMBER( NOTHING ) MOD 2=0, "LightGrey" , "White" ) 5. After you have applied this change and you preview your report, you sho...
The other day I was creating a report and it needed some sorting capabilities. I said to myself, "Self, there may not be a lot of begginers that know how to add sorting capability". What I would like to show you is how to add Interactive Active sorting to your report. After you have added columns to your table, you will want to Right click on your column name and select Text Box Properties: Once in the properties, select Interactive Sorting then click Enable interactive sorting on this text box:...
Once you have installed Sql Server Management Studio, usually Object Explorer will open. If Object Explorer doesn’t immediately open after you get Sql Svr installed, you can go to: 1. View and click 2. Click on Objects Explorer You can also show the list of Registered Servers that you have by going to: 1. View again 2. Click on Registered Servers It’s convenient to have as part of your view because you are able to open your tree view and at minimum you will see your local machine under this list...
First and foremost, let's start off with a definition of a Stored Procedure: It is a compiled set of SQL Commands stored within a database server and is executed as single entity. In this blog, I wanted to show you how to create a couple of different Stored Procedures. You can have one that performs a simple filter like the one below. In this stored procedure we are asking it to only return Invoices that have an InvoiceTotal greater than $500.00. CREATE PROCEDURE spInvoiceTotalGreaterThan$500 AS...