Microsoft has released a cumulative update package (build 3161) for SQL Server 2005 SP2. Among other things, the update package fixes the SSRS black preview.
Read articleNick Barclay is telling us that the book The Rational Guide to Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 that he co-wrote with Adrian Downes is out! You can use BSM to design scorecards that can be published to SharePoint dashboards or SSRS reports. As far as I know, this is the first BSM book which makes it even more appealing.
Read articleA bit outdated announcement perhaps but the Office team has released a Designing SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services Cubes for Excel 2007 PivotTables whitepaper. Instead of pestering you with how-to PivotTable questions, now your users can have proper documentation. A great deal of it discusses UDM implementation details but who is to say that you didn't travel the extra mile… As for me, well I…
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I've been having fun lately with a dashboard page which has an Excel Web Access (EWA) web part connected to a PivotTable report. The PivotTable report is nothing to brag about. It displays a few KPI-related measures coming from an SSAS cube. PivotTable was converted to formulas to achieve a free-form report layout. So far, pretty straightforward stuff. That is, until the customer wanted the…
Read articleAs I mentioned in a previous blog, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 includes updated versions of both the WinForms and ASP.NET versions of the Report Viewer control. Microsoft has just released full and upgrade redistributables for the Report Viewer SP1.
Read articleDocumenting the UDM schema is a common requirement but to the best of my knowledge neither Microsoft nor third-party vendors provide schema generators. While you are waiting for a commercial tool to fill in the gap, you can roll out your own schema generators. Thanks to the Analysis Management Objects (AMO) library, this task is remarkably simple to implement. For example, here is a .NET…
Read articleOne must-read SSRS resource which I missed was the excellent article "Get More Out of SQL Server Reporting Services Charts" by Robert Bruckner from the Reporting Services dev team. Now I have something to point folks to for how-to chart-related questions.
Read articleMVP Summit is over and I am back in Atlanta. I had great time meeting other MVPs, MS employees, and learning about the future in MS terms. I posted pictures from the event. Some interesting statistics given to us by Microsoft: The MVP Summit is the largest event held at the Microsoft campus 1889 attendees were registered to attend 88 countries will be represented (based…
Read articleJoining some 2,000 other MVPs from all around the world, I am heading tomorrow for Seattle to participate in the annual MVP Global Summit. It's time to shake hands, take pictures, put names to faces, and soak up as much as possible about what's coming up in Katmai (the next SQL Server release). Unfortunately, the last part is under strict NDA so I won't be…
Read articleAlthough not a common practice, UDM supports defining text-based calculated members. For example, here is an useless but valid text-based calculated member: Create Member CurrentCube.[Measures].[Hello] As "Hello"; Much to my surprise, a text-based member won't show up in Report Builder. That's because the Report Builder defaults the member's data type to float and the text is simply "lost" when the report is run. How does…
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