• Tech Ed US (Day 2)

    June 11, 2005 / No Comments »

    First, I went to see the Paul Flessner’s keynote. I learned that Reporting Services will be available in all editions of Yukon, including Express! And, custom security will be available in RS Standard Edition as well! Now, we are talking! For more information about how different versions of Yukon will stack against each other, read this comparison document. Next, I went to see Brian Welcker’s presentation about the new report viewer controls in RS 2005. The presentation was in one of the biggest conference halls and it was almost full (with perhaps some 600 people). This speaks by itself about the traction RS is getting. Brian actually wrote a whitepaper about the new features in RS 2005. It is nice to see Reporting Services evolving! Next, I went to see the real-time OLAP presentation from the Analysis Services Team and shake hands with Amir Netz and Richard Tkatchuk. The presentation...

  • Tech Ed US (Day 1)

    June 11, 2005 / No Comments »

    Everyone was rushing in the morning to see Steve Ballmer’s keynote. He said there are some 11,000 folks at the conference. No wonder, all ice creams would disappear even before arrival! Here is some statistics that got posted on the TechEd site:   Feeding the Masses What does it take to feed 13,000 people at Tech·Ed? 117,000 bottles of water 14,300 lattes 15,600 ice cream bars (it’s HOT out there) 4,000 pounds of chips and snack mix 2,300 dozen eggs 8,000 pounds of chicken 52,000 servings of juice You get dizzy if you stay more than 10 minutes in the exhibitor hall area, so I decided to avoid at all cost, or cross it as fast as I can. Otherwise, people will run over me in an endless pursuit to get every possible t-shirt that has been handed out. I got only two but I didn’t have to fight. They...

  • Tech Ed US 2005 (Arrival)

    June 11, 2005 / No Comments »

    Well, here are my “reports” from Tech Ed with some delay thanks to the sporadic internet access.   I arrived in Orlando on Sunday. The flight went fine. I got a bit surprised when I had to wait for a half an hour at the airport to get a shuttle to the hotel. The hotel was Peabody, very close to the Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) where the Tech Ed is hosted. I got a room on the 9th floor. The second surprise was when I discovered that for almost $200 a night in the hotel, I would have no Internet access. To get it, I have to pay only $7 a day J Breakfast wasn’t included too. Common folks, I used to stay in a hotel in Orlando for $80 and it had wireless, plus continental breakfast! Isn’t this America? The hotel didn’t even have a proper desk to...

  • A must-read RS blog

    May 11, 2005 / 1 Comment »

    Brian Welcker, Group Program Manager for SQL Server Reporting Services, has started a blog. Join me to welcome Brian to the blog community and for giving us a chance to get the news directly from the source.  

  • Generate Ad-hoc Reports with Microsoft Reporting Services 2005

    May 10, 2005 / 1 Comment »

    If you have followed the RS 2005 roadmap, you have undoubtedly noticed that among the many new features in Microsoft Reporting Services 2005 is one that can truly help reduce the workload for developers—the ability to give end users the power to generate their own ad-hoc reports. My article explains the major components of Microsoft Reporting Services' ad-hoc architecture and semantic model, and walks you through an end-to-end example that demonstrates how to author, manage, and deliver ad-hoc reports. Happy ad-hoc reporting!

  • More Analysis Services Books

    May 4, 2005 / 2 Comments »

    Chris Webb mentions in his blog about more SSAS-related books coming up. It looks SSAS 2005 is catching like a wild fire :-(

  • Upcoming Business Intelligence webcasts

    May 4, 2005 / 2 Comments »

    There are quite a few upcoming Business Intelligence webcasts you shouldn't miss. If you are interested in the Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2005 make sure to register and mark you calendar.

  • My next book

    May 2, 2005 / 2 Comments »

    I have to admit that I haven’t been very prolific lately on the blog arena. The reason for my extensive absence has been that all of my free time (what’s that?) has been spent writing my forthcoming book. That’s right, let’s blame it all on the book Ladies and gentlemen, I am very excited to announce my next book – “Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform”! As the book name suggests, the focus on the book is Analysis Services 2005 (SSAS). Besides Reporting Services and Integration Services, Analysis Services is the third pillar of the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform. For those of you following this initiative know that there are exciting changes happening in Yukon…at least enough to pick up my interest. I will disclose more details about the book as the project unfolds. I hope the book will hit the retail channels around the...

  • SP2 is here

    April 23, 2005 / 1 Comment »

    The much anticipated and long-delayed RS Service Pack 2 is here! Download it from from the Microsoft Download Center: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=502C0D89-1308-4662-8F58-CEC55EF1235B&displaylang=en. The list of changes and bug fixes can be found here. The SP 2 is cummulative and it includes the SP1 changes. Therefore, you don't need to apply SP1 before installing SP2. Join me to give credit to the RS team for their heroic effort. For little more than a year they managed to release two service packs (with numerious enhancements), merge the RS 2000 codebase into Yukon, implement the new Yukon feature set, and meanwhile address hundreds of questions on the RS newsgroup (which by the way is one of the most active discussion lists). I personally know of a few “enterprise” shops that couldn't complete the design phase for this period of time. Well done for a team of about 30 people!

  • SQL Server 2005 March Community Technical Preview (CTP)

    March 3, 2005 / 2 Comments »

    Today, Microsoft released the third Community Technical Preview (CTP) for SQL Server 2005. The latest CTP includes a number of new features, such as enhanced integration with Visual Studio 2005, performance improvements in Management Studio, a SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 upgrade tool, and 64-bit support for Reporting Services, Notification Services and the management, development and configuration tools. In addition, this CTP includes Report Builder, a new component of SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and based on the technology acquired from ActiveViews. Because the new self-service, ad hoc report building client is built upon SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, the tool will make enterprise reporting easy, scalable, and reliable for end users. This CTP includes model files that can be used with Report Builder. These model files are available as separate downloads from the Beta Download Page. The SQL Server 2005 CTP is now available to all MSDN...

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