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Building Report-enabled Applications with the New ReportViewer Controls (Part 1 of 2)
February 6, 2006 / No Comments »
DevX 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 Windows Forms ReportViewer to integrate your Windows Forms .NET applications with Reporting Services 2005.
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Logging Report Builder Queries
January 29, 2006 / No Comments »
As 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 its trace. 2. You can log the queries to the RS log files or watch them realtime by attaching a trace listener (e.g. the SysInternals DbgView). To enable this option, open the Report Server web.config file and change the Components element as follows: <add name="Components" value="all,RunningJobs:3,SemanticQueryEngine:2,SemanticModelGenerator:2" /> <add name="Components" value="all,RunningJobs:3,SemanticQueryEngine:3,SemanticModelGenerator:2" /> Alternatively, you can omit the SemanticQueryEngine element whatsoever. The net effect of doing so will be escalating the trace switch to 4. You may find this article useful in case you need to learn...
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TechEd 2006 Europe Announced
January 26, 2006 / No Comments »
TechEd 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 ...
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Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005 – Bestseller on Amazon!
January 23, 2006 / No Comments »
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!
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Implementing Smart Reports with the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform
January 17, 2006 / 1 Comment »
This article presents an excerpt from Teo's book Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005. Learn how to author “smart” reports using Reporting Services (SSRS), Analysis Services (SSAS), and SQL Server CLR stored procedures. Get the reports demonstrated in this article by downloading the sample code.
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Implementing Smart Reports Article Available
January 17, 2006 / No Comments »
Microsoft has just published an excerpt from my book "Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005" on TechNet. Learn how to integrate SSRS and SSAS to build smart reports using data mining and CLR stored procedures.
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When Security and Developers Collide
January 13, 2006 / No Comments »
One 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 stored procedure. One of my reporting requirements called for passing some XML metadata in the form of a serialized-to-XML object. The stored procedure had to deserialize the object before it can use it. In my case, the object used a custom XML serialization/deserialization by implementing IXmlSerializable interface. My first attempt to deserialize the object from the CLR stored procedure failed abysmally with the following exception: Cannot load dynamically generated serialization assembly. In some hosting environments assembly load functionality is restricted, consider using pre-generated serializer. Please...
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Reporting from XML documents in RS 2005
January 11, 2006 / No Comments »
Recently, 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 genre="autobiography" publicationdate="1972" ISBN="0399105573"> <title>The Moon's a Balloon</title> <author> <first-name>David</first-name> <last-name>Niven</last-name> </author> <date>09-06-1974</date> <samplechapters>4 5</samplechapters> <price alternative="discount">1.94</price> <price>2.57</price> </book></bookstore> The following query fetches the book/title, book/author/first-name, and book/date elements, as well as book/@publication date. bookstore/book {title, author{first-name}, @publicationdate, date} In my opinion, it could have been nice if you were able to use XPATHs to bring the elements needed instead of this pseudo syntax that relies on curly brackets. Another potential area of improvement is supporting XML schemas to cast the column types automatically according to...
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Excel-based Reporting Services, anyone?
January 4, 2006 / No Comments »
Perhaps, 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 have to report a mind shift. David is a Group Program Manager for Microsoft Excel. It is always great to see Microsoft engineers actively sharing first-hand knowledge so we can get the news straight from the horse’s mouth. Here is what I think about Excel Services based on the David’s notes (I still have to try out my hypothesis). I find the Excel Services model very similar to the Reporting Services architecture. The Excel user authors the spreadsheet using Excel. Then, she can publish the...
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Configuring HTTP access with SSAS 2005
January 3, 2006 / No Comments »
SSAS 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.
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