Finding Reporting Services Service in SharePoint

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SharePoint is a like an ocean – the further you go, the deeper it gets

Ancient proverb 

Scenario: Configure SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services on a multi-server SharePoint farm with the following topology:

WEB1 – Web front-end Server 1

WEB2 – Web front-end Server 2

APP1 – Application server 1 that hosts the Central Administration site

APP2 – Needs SSRS 2012

APP2 – Needs SSRS 2012

Issue: I couldn’t find the SQL Server Reporting Services Service Application option when I expanded the New button in Central Administration ð Manage Service Applications

Resolution: Although the SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services service and Reporting Services Add-in were installed on APP2 and APP3, the SQL Server Reporting Services service wasn’t registered at a farm level. As a result, I couldn’t find the SQL Server Reporting Services Service in Central Admin -> Manage Services on Server on none of the application servers. As it turned out, the SSRS service must be also registered on the application server hosting Central Administration (APP1 in my case) as Prash Shirolkar explains in his blog:

  1. Remote in to APP1.
  2. Install the Reporting Services add-in to get the SSRS PowerShell cmdlets. In my case, I installed only the add-in and not the Reporting Services service since I didn’t want it on APP1.
  3. Run the SharePoint 2010 PowerShell as admin and execute the three commands in the Install and Start the Reporting Services SharePoint Service in the Install Reporting Services SharePoint Mode as a Single Server Farm document:
    1. Install-SPRSService
    2. Install-SPRSServiceProxy
    3. get-spserviceinstance -all |where {$_.TypeName -like “SQL Server Reporting*”} | Start-SPServiceInstance

Interestingly, the first two commands don’t echo any output. The third command, however, should show you a message that the SSRS service has been provisioned. Now, you can go to Central Administration ð Manage Services on Server and you should be able to find the SQL Server Reporting Services Service. More importantly, you should be able to go to Central Administration ð Manage Service Applications, expand the New button and then click SQL Server Reporting Services Service Application to finalize the Reporting Services setup.

Possible alternative resolution path

Although I haven’t tried it because the client woudn’t allow farm configuration changes, another potential resolution path could be to temporarily switch the application server that hosts the Central Administration utility to one of the SSRS application server (APP2 or APP3) as explained in the blog post, “How to change Central Admin Host in SharePoint 2010” by Kirk Barrett. Then, you can register the SSSRS service on that server by executing the steps in item 3 above. Finally, switch back the Central Administration host server to the original server (APP1).

Presenting Personal BI with PowerPivot v2

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022312_1752_PresentingP1I’ll be presenting “Personal BI with PowerPivot v2” for the Atlanta BI Group on Monday, February 27th. Join us to learn when personal BI makes sense and why PowerPivot is the best tool on the market when it does. The focus will be on the new features of PowerPivot version 2 which launch officially in a week or so.

For more information and to register visit our Atlanta BI home page.

 

Announcing My New Book

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021112_1455_AnnouncingM1My new book, Applied Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services (Tabular Modeling), will start shipping in a week with all popular resellers, such as Amazon, B&N, etc. I’ve been working on it for a few months and I’m excited to have it done. While waiting to buy the book, check the following resources to get you started with PowerPivot and Tabular:

– A sample chapter – “Introducing Business Intelligence Semantic Model”

– Video demos – I recorded over three hours of video content for selected exercises in the book

An insightful tour that provides an authoritative yet independent view of this exciting technology, this guide introduces the Tabular side of the innovative Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM) that promotes rapid professional and self-service BI application development. Business analysts and power users will learn how to integrate data from multiple data sources, implement self-service BI applications with Excel, and deploy them to SharePoint. Business intelligence professionals and database administrators will discover how to build corporate solutions powered by BISM Tabular, delivering supreme performance with large data volumes, and how to implement a wide range of solutions for the entire spectrum of personal-team-organizational BI needs.

WHAT’S INSIDE:
Chapter 1: Introducing Business Intelligence Semantic Model

PART I: PERSONAL BI WITH POWERPIVOT FOR EXCEL
Chapter 2: Personal BI Basics
Chapter 3: Importing Data
Chapter 4: Refining the Model
Chapter 5: Analyzing Data
Chapter 6: Implementing Calculations

PART II: TEAM BI WITH POWERPIVOT FOR SHAREPOINT
Chapter 7: Team BI Basics
Chapter 8: SharePoint Insights
Chapter 9: Managing PowerPivot for SharePoint

PART III: ORGANIZATIONAL BI WITH ANALYSIS SERVICES TABULAR
Chapter 10: Organizational BI Basics
Chapter 11: Designing Storage and Security
Chapter 12: Managing Tabular Models

Enoy!

ProcessUpdate and Partition Scans

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I’m working on minimizing the cube processing for a cube with some two billion rows in a fact table. I put together an ETL package that processes the dimensions with ProcessUpdate following by processing the latest partitions. I’ve noticed that processing one of the dimensions , which happens to be the largest (some 1 million rows) and most complicated dimension, resulted in partitions scans. The SQL Profiler showed the scans with the following events:

Finished processing the ‘<partition name>‘ partition

These partition scans don’t result in SQL queries to the database and normally should execute pretty fast. In this case, however, the scans were taking plenty of time resulting in some 15 minutes delay in the incremental processing flow. With some help from T.K. Anand, it turned out that I had a design issue with that dimension. I discovered the issue by changing the KeyDuplicate error in the dimension ErrorConfiguration to True and fully processing the dimension. Dimension processing failed because of the attribute relationships implied a one-to-many relationship between two attributes but the data didn’t support it. Somewhere along the design cycle, I turned off KeyDuplicate probably to get around the same issue in order to process the dimension successfully.

So, the moral of this story is:

  1. Always check your dimensions with the Dimension Health Check feature of the BIDS Helper.
  2. Don’t turn off KeyDuplicate.

BTW, the problem with duplicate key errors is that the server can move members around and that would cause indexes and aggregations to require being rebuilt. For example, if you have the following members in the source data:

Attr1Key    Attr2Key

55        32

55        35

The first time, the engine may store 32 as the related member. But the second time it sees the rows during ProcessUpdate, it would potentially choose 35 as the related member. And that’s going to cause indexes and aggregations to need rebuilding.

Record Attendance for Atlanta BI Group Last Night

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We had the pleasure to have some 70 people attending our January 30th, 2012 meeting of the Atlanta BI group. Our sponsor, Matrix Resources, was kind enough to give us the auditorium. FisionIO sponsored the meeting. Phil Per-Lee did us a “Prototypes with Pizza” presentation, titled Connecting the Dots. And, Carlos Rodrigues rocked the stage with the main presentation about dimensional modeling.

I’ve uploaded pictures to the Photo Gallery section of our website and the slides to the Resources section. We’ve got some cool presentations lined up for next few months. Check our Calendar section to see what’s coming.

Downloading Multiple Files from SharePoint using WebDav

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I had to download many ASP.NET pages from the SharePoint Pages library that were used to wrap up the Reporting Services ReportViewer webpart. I wanted the pages as files, so I could deploy them to another SharePoint server. Unfortunately, SharePoint doesn’t support selecting and downloading multiple files. But, it does support the WebDAV protocol.

  1. Open Windows Explorer and type in the following URL:
    \\<SharePoint site>\<library>

    Example: \\elitex\Pages, where elitex is the SharePoint server and Pages is the document library.

  2. Windows Explorer shows all documents in the library. From there on, just copy the files you need to another folder.

The only caveat is that you need to make sure the WebClient Windows service is running on your laptop. If you’re trying to connect from Windows 2008 Server, then make sure the Desktop Experience role is installed as well, which installs that WebClient service.

Subscription and Alerts Issues with Analysis Services in SQL Server 2012

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As you probably now, Reporting Services doesn’t allow you to create subscriptions with data sources that use Windows security because subsbscriptions are run in unattended mode. Moving to SQL Server 2012, we’ll add Data Alerts to the list. This presents an issue if you use Analysis Services which only supports Windows security. The only option is to use Stored Credentials with the “Use as Windows credentials” checkbox checked. You won’t able to pass the user identity by checking “Set execution context to this account”. As with previous releases, “Set execution context to this account” works with the SQL Server data but it doesn’t work with the Analysis Services provider.

I raised this issue to Microsoft and I posted a bug report. The issue is under investigation but it’s unlikely to get fixed before SQL Server 2012 ships. Please vote!

Online PowerPivot Class

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I am teaching my online Applied PowerPivot class for personal and team business intelligence on Jan 24th and 25th and there are still seats available.