Thanks for the Geoff’s feedback on the discussion list, today I was able to demystify one of the SSRS-SSAS integration “gotchas” that has been pestering me for quite some time. Sometimes a report may need the Jump to URL navigational feature to open a parameterized OLAP report. Since the UDM member unique names contain & (to designate the key), I have been unable to find…
Read articleAs I mentioned in a previous post, one of the most exciting (but not well known and documented) extensibility areas of SSRS 2005 is custom report items (CRI). Read my latest article "Jazz Up Your Data Using Custom Report Items In SQL Server Reporting Services reports" published in the October issue of MSDN Magazine to learn how to implement a progress bar CRI.
Read articleCizer 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…
Read articleThe 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.
Read articleTuning 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,…
Read articleIf 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…
Read articleI 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…
Read articleRecently 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…
Read articleJust 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:…
Read articleDownload an updated version of the documentation and samples for Microsoft SQL Server 2005.
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