Courtesy to Francois Ajenstat, Director of Product Management for Microsoft SQL Server, we know that SQL Server 2008 is on the August price list. What this probably means according to my interpretation is that the SQL Server 2008 RTM date is close. More than likely, SQL Server 2008 will be released in August.
One of the new features in Reporting Services 2008 that debuted in the SQL Server 2008 RC0 build is the enhanced textbox report item. In previous releases, if you wanted to mix static and dynamic expression-based text, you either needed multiple textboxes or a Visual Basic expression to concatenate strings together. The first approach led to textbox “explosion”. The disadvantage of the second approach was that you couldn’t format string fragments inside the same textbox independently.
In Reporting Services 2008, the textbox report item has been redesigned to support multiple bands of text. The screenshot shows a report title of a sales order report. In the past, you w
ould need two textboxes (or three if you wanted different formatting for the sales order number). You may be surprised to find that the entire title is implemented as a single textbox with two paragraphs. The second paragraph combines static text (Order #:) with dynamic text ([SalesOrderNumber]), which defines a placeholder for a dataset field value. Each fragment can have its own format settings. Thanks to these enhancements, you’ll find that by moving to Reporting Services 2008, you need fewer textboxes and you need to write less often expressions that concatenate text. Moreover, the new textbox lets you implement report solutions, such as mail merge, that were difficult or impossible to implement with previous releases.
Many report authors will rejoice learning that the textbox report item now supports a subset of HTML tags for formatting the text content. This is also known as rich formatting (not be confused with RTF which is not supported). You can import static HTML text or bind the textbox to a dataset field. For instance, if the dataset field includes HTML tags, such as <b>SO50750</b>, you can configure the textbox to interpret these tags and display the sales order number in bold.
Microsoft has refreshed the product samples and AdventureWorks databases. I still have to figure out what’s the AdventureWorksAS2008 database that is not released yet.
Today, Microsoft released an updated feature pack for SQL Server 2008 RC0. Among other things, it includes:
Microsoft declared build #1442.32 to be the official SQL 2008 RC0 build and made it publicly available.
Key SSRS improvements in this build:
February CTP is out. It brings the much anticipated integration with Visual Studio 2008 and the new BIDS Report Designer.
Download the February CTP here:
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2008/prodinfo/download.mspx
Updated Books Online for February CTP are available here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=19DB0B42-A5B2-456F-9C5C-F295CDD58D7A&displaylang=en
What’s new in Reporting Services February CTP (compared to the previous November 2007 CTP):
Francois Ajenstat, Director of Product Management for Microsoft SQL Server, tells us that SQL Server 2008 will be released in Q3 2008 while Release Candidate (RC) is expected in Q2. The February 27th marketing launch date remains unchanged.
There could be 1001 reasons why IE asks you for credentials when you access a website configured for Windows Authentication and none of them has to do with Reporting Services itself. Windows Vista and IE 7 add yet another one. IE 7 will prompt you for credentials if your computer is not added to a domain and you access a local website configured for Windows Authentication, such as http://localhost/reports. Thanks to the help from James Wu on the SSRS team and Bryan Noyes’s blog, the solution is simple.
If it still prompts and you have SQL Server 2008 installed, it could be an issue with Kerberos. To fix this, open the ReportServer configuration file (rsreportserver.config). Locate the following section:
<Authentication>
<AuthenticationTypes>
<!–RSWindowsNegotiate/–>
<RSWindowsNTLM/>
</AuthenticationTypes>
<EnableAuthPersistence>true</EnableAuthPersistence>
</Authentication>
Comment the <RSWindowsNegotiate/> element or remove it, so only <RSWindowsNTLM/> is enabled.
Here is a useful page from the SQL Server 2008 BOL that summarizes the SSAS performance improvements in Katmai pretty well. It also shows which functions are optimized. For example, the Lag function wasn’t optimized in 2005 but now is.
The November CTP (CTP5) of SQL Server 2008 is out. Here are the most significant BI-related highlights that caught my attention.
The standalone Report Designer has undergone a major facelift. It now sponsors a shiny Office 2007 ribbon interface. It will surely charm end users who are planning to use the standalone Report Designer for ad hoc reporting. The bad news is that there is still much integration work ahead. For example, the Analysis Services and custom data processing extensions are not integrated yet. Further, only the Dundas chart component has made the CTP5 cut. Nevertheless, I am very excited about the standalone Report Designer and its long-term potential to unite professional and end-user reporting needs.
The block computation enhancements debut in CTP5. Based on my experiments, they result in 50-60 percent and more improvement in query response times. For example, a highly inefficient Report Builder query that filters on a measure would take hours with SSSAS 2005. With CTP5 of SSAS 2008, the same query finishes under a minute! Put in highly technical terms, the nastier the query is, the faster it will with SSAS 2008. There are also optimizations in MOLAP write-back that remove the need to query ROLAP partitions although I haven’t given them a try.
CTP5 brings lookup performance enhancements. Are the SSIS guys lazy or what? J
One BI-related enhancement with a great potential is Change Data Capture (CDC). When enabled, this features tracks changes to data, including inserts, deletes, and updates. This means that ETL process can quickly detect what changes have been made to a given table by just querying the CDC internal tables. For example, you query CDC to return only the new records that have been added to a table after a given data. As you can imagine, this baby will be a welcome enhancement with large data warehouses and can help you optimize the ETL processes.
