Cizer.Net Reporting 4.0 Released

/0 Comments/in /by

Cizer Software today announced the release to market of Cizer.Net Reporting 4.0 – a web-based report designer for Microsoft Reporting Services. According to the company "both Standard and Enterprise editions enjoy more functionality than ever before within the Cizer Quick Query module to allow enhanced formatting, with the addition of charting and logos, as well as the addition of Summary Reporting – all via point-and-click design with no knowledge of SQL required."

BI Market Share Report

/0 Comments/in /by

The latest research by IDC shows Microsoft is ahead of the pack in terms of growth in the business intelligence (BI) tools market. Microsoft ranked fourth in the overall market share and had the highest growth (25%) for the period 2004-2005. The release of SQL Server 2005 and the acquisition of ProClarity (evaluated separately on the report) will most likely gain additional momentum.

Dundas Map for Reporting Services

/0 Comments/in /by

Tuning again on the Dundas wave, the same company announced the pre-release availability of the Dundas Map for Reporting Services 2005. Designed as a custom report item (new extensibility feature with SSRS 2000) the Dundas Map allows report authors to present geographic data graphically in reports. The Dundas Map for Reporting Services with be included free in the Dundas Reporting Services Dashboard Bundle alongside chart, gauge, and calendar controls.

Dundas Chart for OLAP Services

/0 Comments/in /by

If you are on a lookout for a web-based smart chart that can browse SSAS 2005 cubes, don’t look further. Enter Dundas Chart for OLAP Services! Despite the name (what’s Dundas anyway?), I really fell in love with this control after playing it with its demos for a while. The chart can connect to both server and local cubes. The attached image shows the Dundas Chart connected to the Adventure Works DW cube.

The beauty of the Dundas Chart is that it’s more than a chart. It is a web-based OLAP browser. And it’s AJAX-enabled so the page doesn’t re-post as result of user actions! From an end-user perspective, authoring a chart is a matter of dragging and dropping dimensions and measures. The same experience as creating an OLAP-based pivot or chart report in Excel.

Given the void left by OWC and the lack of Microsoft OLAP browser controls, the Dundas Chart for OLAP Services is definitely something to consider when planning for multi-dimensional web reports.

Timeout Quest

/0 Comments/in /by

I was on an interesting quest today. I had to troubleshoot why some long-running SSRS reports time out after a fixed period of time. An SSRS report can time out for at least three different reasons. First, the dataset query could have been set to time out (see DataSet Query tab). The default query timeout is 30 seconds. You can set the query timeout to 0 to prevent the query from timing out.

Second, the entire report may be set to time out . By default (see the Site Settings page in the Report Manager), all reports are set to time out after 1,800 seconds (30 minutes) but the report timeout can be overridden at the report level by using the report execution properties. When the report timeout is up, the Report Server simply terminates the report.

Finally, if your application calls down to the RS Web service to run a report (the Render API), the web service call may timeout. That’s because in .NET, the web service proxy has a Timeout property.

As usual, as one of the first step of troubleshoot an SSRS issue, I fired up the SysInternals DebugView tracer to watch the output from the Report Server. It turned out that the reports would time out after exactly three minutes. When this happened, the Report Server would gently complain that the ASP.NET thread had terminated without throwing an exception. This led me to believe that this issue was outside the Report Server. After further digging, it turned out that the proxy Timeout was set to 180 seconds. Setting it to -1 solved the problem. Keep in mind though that the IIS could also terminate a long-running report, e.g. if the IIS 6.0 application pool is set to terminate long-running threads.

Installing Reporting Services 2005 on Named Instance

/0 Comments/in /by

Here are the steps I’ve recently followed to install successfully SRRS 2005 on a named instance.




  1. Follow the steps in the “To Install Reporting Services Side-by-Side With an Earlier Version” section in BOL.


  2. Navigate to http://localhost/reportserver/. If you get access denied error to rsreportserver.config (or another folder/fiile), add the SSRS Windows Services account (e.g. NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM) and the Web service (ASPNET) to the SQLServer2005ReportServerUser$<machine>$<instance> and  SQLServer2005ReportingServicesWebServiceUser$<machine>$<instance> Windows groups respectively.


  3. Try to open Report Manager. If you get an error that the Report Server cannot open a connection to the database, go back to the Reporting Services Configuration tool.



  • Switch to the Database Setup tab.


  • Select the Server Name and Database Name (ReportServer) and click the Script button.


  • In the Create Scripts dialog, select the Grant Rights Script option.
    Type in the Web service account (e.g. ASPNET) in the User Name field and select the Windows User Account checkbox. Click OK to generate the script.


  • Double-click the script file to open it in the SQL Server Management Studio and execute it. This should grant the necessary permissions to the Web service to connect.

Strangely, on a Windows 2000 box, the Reporting Configuration Tool was showing the following error:


ReportServicesConfigUI.WMIProvider.WMIProviderException: An unknown error has occurred in the WMI Provider. Error Code 80070005   at ReportServicesConfigUI.WMIProvider.RSReportServerAdmin.SetWebServiceIdentity(String applicationPool)


I wasn’t able to figure out how to fix the above error message but it didn’t seem to affect the Report Server.

UDM Many-to-many Relations and "AND" queries

/0 Comments/in /by

Recently I got an interesting question about querying UDM many-to-many relationships. For example, in my book I demonstrated how you can implement an UDM model (Bank cube) that has a many-to-many relationship between bank customers and their accounts. That’s because a customer could have more than one account and an account can belong to more than one customer (a joint account).


 


But what if you want to find only the joint accounts that are owned by any two customers?  The following query returns the accounts owned by Bob and Alice:


 


SELECT


NON EMPTY {[Measures].[Balance]} ON COLUMNS,


Intersect


   (


     Exists([Account].[Account Number].[Account Number],


[Customer].[Full Name].&[Bob], “Customer Account”),


Exists([Account].[Account Number].[Account Number], [Customer].[Full Name].&[Alice], “Customer Account”)


   )  ON ROWS


 FROM Bank


 


The trick is to evaluate the sets over the hybrid “Customer Account” measure group which is actually a dimension table but plays a role of a measure group. The Exists function returns the accounts that the given customer owns. The Intersect function returns the subset of the customer sets.

OWC to Bite the Dust

/0 Comments/in /by

Just learned from the David Gainer’s post, that Microsoft has made a decision to retire Office Web Components (OWC) in favor of Excel Services. This is definitely sad news for me. While I agree that Excel Services could fulfill some of the integration scenarios mentioned in the comments for that post, I can think of at least two scenarios where this won’t be the case:



  1. You need a cost effective and easy way to provide OLAP features in your applications. The Office Server pricing model has not been announced yet but it could be intimidating for small companies or application vendors. Not to mention that SharePoint requires Windows Server.

  2. You need to embed an OLAP browser in your Windows Forms application. Currently, I don’t know of a way to embed an Excel spreadsheet on a Windows Form (VSTO, Excel Services, VBA, etc. don’t support this). Not to mention that if browsing cubes is the only thing you need, installing and maintaining the entire Office Server stack may be a difficult proposition.

IMO, it could have been great if the OWC were replaced with a web and Windows Forms OLAP viewers similar to the VS.NET report viewers for SSRS 2005. This would have given developers a light-weight alternative for UDM application integration. Now, we have to wait for third-party vendors to fill in the void. Sigh…

AdventureWorks DW Workspaces Templates Available for Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager

/0 Comments/in /by

These samplesThese samples will get you up and running with Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 utilizing the sample OLAP database provided with Microsoft SQL Server and Analysis Services 2005 called AdventureWorks DW. The purpose of the AdventureWorks DW database is to provide a sample database for exploring the possibilities of OLAP. will get you up and running with Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 utilizing the sample OLAP database provided with Microsoft SQL Server and Analysis Services 2005 called AdventureWorks DW.