Archive for year: 2005

I couldn’t sleep well last night. My neighbor on the left was talking on her cell phone until midnight and I can hear every damn word through the thin wall. My other neighbor was watching a horror movie. A double impact. Not to mention that the cell phone of my left neighbor  rang and woke me up at 6. Luckily, today is not presentation day.

In the morning, I went to see the Managing Analysis Services 2005 Using Analysis Management Objects (AMO) presentation by Alex Lim. Alex is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. We introduced to each other and talked briefly about South-east Asia. I spent three years in Singapore, so we had a lot in common. I liked the demo code that Alex used for his presentation. For those who are new to Analysis Services 2005, AMO is a .NET-based object library which allows you to manage SSAS programmatically. It is a successor of DSO. Cool stuff, if you ever need it.

I had a great lunch with Brian Welcker to catch up on the latest on RS and beyond. Lately, I haven’t been buried in my book and SSAS, so I’ve neglected RS 2005 a bit. It turns out that there is plenty to learn.

Next, I went to see Developing SQL Server 2005 OLAP Applications with ADO MD.NET presentation by Andrew Brust (another MVP). An excellent presentation! ADO MD.NET is a thin managed wrapper on top of the XMLA protocol. It is what you need to send MDX queries to SSAS from a .NET application.

Finally, I attended the Custom Reporting Services Items presentation by Andrew Bryan (a Product Manager of Dundas Software). These are the same guys who did the RS chart region. I didn’t have time to look at this extensibility area in RS 2005 so I found the presentation useful. It turns out that you can write a custom report item and plug it in RS just like you can do this with ASP.NET. Unfortunately, you cannot re-use existing ASP.NET controls. Writing custom report items could be very useful for ISVs, I suppose.

Next, I went to have a session rehearsal since my presentation is tomorrow. Today is also the Tech Ed Attendee’s party in Universal Studio. I hopped on the bus to see the latest and greatest rides. I didn’t have much time since I wanted to get back to the hotel by 10:30. First, I saw Shrek since it happens to be my favorite movie. I enjoyed very much. The 4D effects were awesome. The idea was that the Lord Farquad is not dead and he’s now a ghost. He kidnaps Fiona and Shrek and Donkey are chasing him with the dragon.

Next, I went to see Twister which simulates a class 5 tornado. Got soaked up pretty well. Next, I saw the Mummy. This was a hell of a intensive roller coaster ride. I thought I would vomit at some point. I wanted to see Men In Black but the wait was one hour! So, I went to see Terminator. I’ve been in Universal about 5 years ago, so I thought they may have upgraded the show. I was the same stuff but nonetheless pretty good.

I went back to the hotel and slept like a baby. Tomorrow is my presentation.

First, I went to see the Paul Flessner’s keynote. I learned that Reporting Services will be available in all editions of Yukon, including Express! And, custom security will be available in RS Standard Edition as well! Now, we are talking! For more information about how different versions of Yukon will stack against each other, read this comparison document.

Next, I went to see Brian Welcker’s presentation about the new report viewer controls in RS 2005. The presentation was in one of the biggest conference halls and it was almost full (with perhaps some 600 people). This speaks by itself about the traction RS is getting. Brian actually wrote a whitepaper about the new features in RS 2005. It is nice to see Reporting Services evolving!

Next, I went to see the real-time OLAP presentation from the Analysis Services Team and shake hands with Amir Netz and Richard Tkatchuk. The presentation made a great case for real-time OLAP with proactive caching. The motto was “no more explicit cube processing!”. In my opinion though (my sole opinion, mind you), pro-active caching may not be that useful with data warehousing where data is loaded in a deterministic fashion. In this case, it may be more appropriate to process cubes explicitly, once ETL processes are done. That said, I can see real-time OLAP being really useful if the cube is built on top of the OLTP database. Something to think about…

Well, here are my “reports” from Tech Ed with some delay thanks to the sporadic internet access.

I arrived in Orlando on Sunday. The flight went fine. I got a bit surprised when I had to wait for a half an hour at the airport to get a shuttle to the hotel. The hotel was Peabody, very close to the Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) where the Tech Ed is hosted. I got a room on the 9^th floor.

The second surprise was when I discovered that for almost $200 a night in the hotel, I would have no Internet access. To get it, I have to pay only $7 a day J Breakfast wasn’t included too. Common folks, I used to stay in a hotel in Orlando for $80 and it had wireless, plus continental breakfast! Isn’t this America? The hotel didn’t even have a proper desk to do some work in a civilized manner. They had to fancy glass tables which I had to convert to a working area… and use an extra pillow for back support. Something is wrong here… perhaps, it is me – “the alien”, who’s too picky.

I went to register late at evening at the convention center. This turned out to be a great idea. The next day (Monday), the lines were huge. I think about 6 lines total with hundreds of people waiting. Honestly, I wasn’t prepared for an event of such a magnitude, as the Donkey would say (see Shrek).

If you have followed the RS 2005 roadmap, you have undoubtedly noticed that among the many new features in Microsoft Reporting Services 2005 is one that can truly help reduce the workload for developers—the ability to give end users the power to generate their own ad-hoc reports. My article explains the major components of Microsoft Reporting Services’ ad-hoc architecture and semantic model, and walks you through an end-to-end example that demonstrates how to author, manage, and deliver ad-hoc reports.

Happy ad-hoc reporting!