Many of you may now or in the future have the need to upgrade your SSIS packages to the new SQL Server 2012 SSIS. Luckily, upgrading from SSIS 2005 or 2008 isn’t nearly as painful as you may have experienced upgrading old DTS (SQL Server 2000) packages. If you’re considering the upgrade to 2012 here are some of the new features you have to look forward to: Usability fixes in the development environment (Resolve References, Undo, Zoom, etc…) New/Changed Tasks and Transforms (CD...
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Another SQL Rally has wrapped up in Dallas, TX and it was great event. My favorite part about these larger events is being able to meet new people and see old friends that I haven’t seen for months. Unfortunately, I did not attend any of the precons this year but I did see a lot of great sessions. I made it a point to at this event to reach outside my comfort zone with the types of sessions I attended. Here’s a wrap up of my couple days in Dallas: Thursday I started my morning by att...
We’ve completed reviewing the major Microsoft tools and now you have to make “The Decision”. Which tool(s) is the best fit for the reporting needs? Remember just picking one tool and using it for all reports may not be the best decision because you are missing out on a lot of the benefits of other tools. One tool I like to use that helps me make a decision like this is a decision matrix. With a decision matrix you provide the possible options, which for us has been the followin...
As Business Intelligence has evolved over the years the number of tools we have to choose from for presenting data has advanced drastically. With so many tools to choose from it can be rather confusing (especially when your company is just getting their feet wet in BI) to determine which tool is the right one for an organizations reporting needs. Just within the Microsoft suite of tools (not including third-party tools) you have Reporting Services, Excel, PowerPivot, PerformancePoint and Power V...
This post is a continuation of a series started to help you understand each of the Microsoft presentation layer tools purpose and when you should choose each for your reporting solution. The decision to pick the appropriate tool is difficult but so very important as I detailed in part one of this series. As I continue the discussion here again are the different tools I will detail: Reporting Services Excel (From the perspective of building PivotTables without PowerPivot) PowerPivot PerformancePo...
Today I’ll be continuing in a blog series designed to help you decide which presentation tool is best for your reporting needs. So far I’ve discussed in previous posts: Reporting Services Excel (From the perspective of building PivotTables without PowerPivot) You learned how these two tools are almost opposites of each other. Reporting Services is generally thought of as a static reporting tool, while Excel is usually used for ad-hoc reporting. The products still left to cover are: P...
If you’ve followed this blog series from the beginning then you may have started thinking about which tools would be best for your environment. If so that’s great and I’m glad I got you thinking, but I encourage you to keep an open mind as we go through the last couple tools because both PerformancePoint and Power View provide some of the most impressive visualizations that the Microsoft BI reporting tools have to offer. If you’re new to reading this blog series I encoura...
In part five of this on going series about choosing the right reporting tool we will discuss the newest of tools called Power View. While Power View is part of Reporting Services in SQL Server 2012 I’ve decided to split it as it’s own topic to help understand when you would use it over the traditional SSRS reports. Now, because this is one of the newest reporting tools you can count on much of this post to get outdated over time. In fact, a lot of the limitation you may see me descri...
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of speaking in Orlando, FL at the OPASS monthly meeting. I spoke on Extending SSRS with Custom Code and you can find the presentation material here . What I’d really like to share with you about the event is what a fantastic group this is. They really know how to welcome new people and serve out some amazing food too! OPASS meets the third Thursday every month at an amazing location called Route 46. Here’s the address: Route 46 4316 SR 46 Sanford, FL ...
In case you didn’t see the email come through for PASS this week the SQL Rally schedule is now available. The event will be in Dallas May 10-11 with lots of great session so be sure to check it out. Here’s a link to the PDF or I’ve included screenshots here of each day. You can also build you schedule now here . Thursday May 10, 2012 Friday May 11, 2012
This month I’ll be out and about quite a bit with speaking events. Thought I’d detail them quickly in case you’re in Florida or interested in attending a free webinar. Most topics on reporting of some nature this month. Date: 04/11/2012 Group: Microsoft Webinar Series: Twelve Days of SQL 2012 Topic: Power View (SSRS) Power View has the capability of creating eye-popping visualizations within SharePoint 2010. It provides intuitive ad-hoc reporting that can be used by a variety o...
SQL Saturday Jacksonville is just under a month away (April 28) and I’m happy to announce the we recently released the schedule for the event. We have a great line up of speakers with a variety of topics for both DBAs and Business Intelligence developers. You can register to attend the event here . While the speakers may be all set for the event we’re still looking for sponsors. If you’re interested in sponsoring our event please visit our sponsorship page . Don’t forget ...
Another release that went without much trumpeting was the SQL Server 2012 Data Mining add-in for Excel 2010. This has been a much awaited release for those vested in Data Mining. The current release was only available for Excel 2007 and if you tried to use it in Excel 2010 it only worked for 32 bit machines. You’ll find now a 32 bit and 64 bit version available now. Go download and start playing with the latest release here. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=29061
Somewhat overshadowed, for obvious reasons, by the big RTM release of SQL Server 2012 was the RTM release of PowerPivot 2012. You can go download the much improved version of PowerPivot for Excel here. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=29074 To give you a fair warning there are some prerequisites to installing that were not required in the previous version of PowerPivot that you can find on the download site: Install .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office R...
Reporting Services performance problems can often be narrowed down to report design or resource constraints and sometimes a combination of the two. In this post I’ll review the process of scaling-out Reporting Services so server resource constraints can be shared across multiple servers instead of relying on a single server for all report processing. If you are new to understanding Reporting Services architecture it is important to understand the general steps that are occurring behind the...
Have you ever experienced this? You have developed a set of Reporting Services report that your users love and they often show them off. The most common way users show off the reports is by taking screenshot images of the reports and embedding those images in a PowerPoint slide deck along with other information they plan to discuss. I personally have seen this several times and I’ve always thought wouldn’t it be better to have a live version of the report available in the PowerPoint ...
Today Pragmatic Works released a whitepaper I wrote and I thought I would share it with you. Prepare for Marketing email… A Whitepaper by Devin Knight SQL Server Reporting Services is capable of creating eye-popping visualizations that can be consumed by a variety of business users. The tool has built-in functionality for developers to produce reports that users will find not only functional, but also visually appealing. This whitepaper will focus on how to overcome the gaps that expressi...
I’m so excited to tell you about SQL Saturday 130 in Jacksonville coming April 28th. This is the 5th year SQL Saturday has been held in Jacksonville and we have some exciting news about the event this year. If you have never attended a SQL Saturday before… WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?! All kidding aside you really are missing out if you’ve never been to these free events that occur all over the world now. This year we are happy to announce that Kevin Kline will be delivering a Preconf...
Dynamic Management Views are a very powerful tool that are part of Analysis Services in 2008 and 2008 R2. They give you the ability to monitor Analysis Services usage and metadata. MSDN articles on SSAS DMVs – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms126079.aspx Good post on using SSAS DMVs – http://dwbi1.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/ssas-dmv-dynamic-management-view/ A report developer could leverage the capability to read Analysis Services metadata to build a report that can dynamicall...
In a previous post I wrote about how you can use embedded custom code to extend the capabilities of Reporting Services. This week I will show you another method of using custom code but this time with external assemblies. Ideally when using custom code you would choose to do so using external assemblies. External assemblies help developers manage code from outside Reporting Services and share the exact same code across multiple report. Here’s a few of the pros and cons of using external as...
This is my wish list of things I’d like to cover in todays session at 11 AM EST https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/935071481 but seeing that I know I’ll only get to a third of these thought I would post these for everyone. If you’re seeing this late the sessions are recorded and can be viewed on www.pragmaticworks.com/Resources/webinars . Next week look for a while paper I’ll be releasing on the same topic but of course with more details and screenshots. This post is p...
It has been a quiet past few months while my family has adjusted to having two new additions (twins!), but I have slowly been working my way back into several speaking events. Having said that January is a busy month of events and I thought I would share them in case you are interested in attending any of them. Date: 01/12/2012 Group: South East Michigan SQL Server User Group Topic: Creating Dashboards with PerformancePoint Services This is a user group that I will be speaking virtually for but ...
When developing reports in Reporting Services you will often use the built-in expression language to make report data and formatting dynamic. The expression language can do a lot to within Reporting Services but any gaps in functionality that it has can be filled with custom code. There are two ways to implement custom code in Reporting Services. The first way, which I will show in the post, is with embedded code. The other method is to create an external assembly that can be imported into a rep...
Display folders are an often used tool in Analysis Services to help end users navigate through a cube or dimension they could find what they need to build a report. Imagine you develop a cube that has dozens of measures. For an end user to find what they need they would be forced to dig through every measure. If an end user gets lost while trying browsing the cube they are a lot less likely to continue using it. This is where display folders come in handy. They make it easy for end users to find...
The Analysis Services Deployment Wizard is an often under utilized but important tool when moving your OLAP database throughout your environment. Often I see developers deploy directly from BIDS to all Development, QA, and Production environment by changing the project properties to the different instances. For multiple reasons this is a bad practice. With a sloppy developer like me I’m likely to accidently deploy to the wrong server. You could unintentionally deploy over Production securi...