Nick Barclay from Australia has good things to say about my book “Applied Microsoft Analysis Services in Action”. No, I didn’t sweat blood, but I have to admit that writing this one wasn’t easy! It took me almost twice as long to write it as my previous “Microsoft Reporting Services in Action” book. For the most part, that was because Analysis Services is a focal…
Read articleEuan Garden (Product Unit Manager for SQL Server) tells us that SQL Server Express Advanced Services (which includes Reporting Services Express) has reached a beta stage. I emphasized the importance of choosing the right RS edition in one of my previous blogs.
Read articleDevX has just published Part 1 of my article Building Report-enabled Applications with the Windows Forms ReportViewer. Part 2 (ASP.NET ReportViewer) should be out by the end of February. Reporting is an integral part of every complete application. The Report Viewer controls greatly reduce the development effort required to report-enable .NET applications. Part one of this two-part article shows you how you can leverage the…
Read articleAs you probably know, the RS 2005 Report Builder lets business users create ad-hoc reports. Behind the scenes, the Query Translator converts the report metadata to the native queries supported by the relational data source (SQL Server and UDM with RS 2005 only). If you want to see the underlying queries, you have two choices: 1. You can use the SQL Server Profiler and examing…
Read articleTechEd 2006 Europe will take place in Barcelona, Spain (7 -10 November 2006). Barcelona is one of the cities I always wanted to visit and I hope I will be able to make it. Summer could have been much better for a fiesta, of course ...
Read article
My book “Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005” book is a bestseller on Amazon! It is currently ranked No 94 for Computers and Internet (as of Jan 23). The book is now in its second printing (it's been available on Amazon since 12/15/2005). Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Read articleOne of the most outstanding SQL Server 2005 feature is CLR stored procedures. A CLR stored procedure can encapsulate complex .NET code, process data, and pipe the results back to your report. The advantage of using CRL stored procedures is that from a reporting perspective things are very simple. The report just needs to call the CLR stored procedure, as it would call a regular SQL Server…
Read articleRecently, I’ve come across a question on the RS public newsgroup about how to use the new RS 2005 XML extension to report off relative nodes in an XML document. The attached sample demonstrates this scenario. For example, given this document: <bookstore xmlns="http://example.books.com"> <book genre="autobiography" publicationdate="1981" ISBN="1-861003-11-0"> <title>The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin</title> <author> <first-name>Benjamin</first-name> <last-name>Franklin</last-name> </author> <date>09-06-1956</date> <samplechapters>1 3 4</samplechapters> <price alternative="discount">5.99</price> <price>8.99</price> </book> <book…
Read articlePerhaps, you’ve heard that Excel 12 will support publishing and executing Excel spreadsheets on the server through a server-based technology (currently dubbed Excel Services). My first reaction when I’ve heard about this was “who on earth would ever want to do this?” However, after reading the David Gainer’s excellent blog (will anyone compile these great notes into a book?) I got my "Eureka" and I…
Read articleSSAS 2005 can be configured for HTTP access, e.g. for Internet reporting. Here are two whitepapers with step-by-step instructions for configuring Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP for HTTP access with SSAS 2005.
Read article
