PROLOGIKA BLOG · IDEAS FROM THE FIELD
Practical perspectives on Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, semantic models, and the work of turning data into insight.
Explore the latest articlesReporting Services has gone a long way for the past five years and it's getting better. In the spirit of the season, here is my Reporting Services Top 10 Wish List revised from three years ago. This list is based on my work, so your priorities may differ. Improved Analysis Services integration – Since its debut in SSRS 2005, the MDX query designer hasn't changed.…
Read articleIn case you've missed this, the Pivot era has begun. After Excel PivotTable and PivotChart, we'll have PowerPivot in SQL Server 2008 R2. But Pivot evolves… A co-worker showed me today a glimpse of the Pivot future which I guess is the Microsoft Live Labs Pivot. Since grids and charts are not cool anymore we now have pictures and animation. It's hard for me to…
Read article
Now that I've got my copy and read it, I can say a few things about the book Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services by Chris Webb, Alberto Ferrari, and Marco Russo. As mentioned in another post, the authors (all MVPs and prominent SSAS experts) don't disappoint and you won't go wrong picking up this book. The book is somewhat small…
Read article
R2 brings several SharePoint enhancements, including: Support for multiple SharePoint zones – Previously, SSRS supported access from SharePoint URLs in the default zone, as I explained before. Support for the SharePoint Universal Logging service - Reporting Services introduced a new server interface called IRSSetUserToken. When this interface is implemented, the report server calls the UserToken Set property on this interface and passes the SharePoint user…
Read article
The major new R2 feature that debuts in CTP 3 (November CTP) of SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services is report parts. A report part is a fragment of a report definition that you can publish to the report server to facilitate best practices and reuse. Just like a developer can refactor and share some piece of code, the report author can re-factor a portion…
Read articleMicrosoft released Cumulative Update Package 5 for SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 (build 10.00.2746). Among other things, if fixes an SSRS issue with printing and conditional visibility of recursive groups which I reported.
Read article
Besides indicators, R2 adds sparklines and data bars to the arsenal of data visualization features. Sparklines are small graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, and images. They help end users visualize simple trends. You could implement sparklines and simple data bars in the previous versions of Reporting Services but you had to go through many steps to strip down the chart or gauge…
Read article
Often, reports need to show images that represent discrete values, such as an image that shows a KPI status. Previously, you didn't have another option but to use images that are dynamically changed based on the field value. Indicators, a new R2 feature, make this much simpler. In Reporting Services, an indicator is a simplified gauge region that lets you associate images with states. Although…
Read article
R2 brings more control over pagination and rendering. A question that pops every now and then on the discussion list is how to name Excel worksheets for each instance of a row group. This scenario wasn't supported before R2. In R2, there are addition page break options, as shown in the screenshot below. One of them is PageName. In this case, I set the PageName…
Read article
When the Reporting Service team asked my opinion about shared datasets, a new feature in the forthcoming SQL Server Reporting Services R2, I was somewhat skeptical. I preferred them to focus on more important in my mind features, such as the ability to join datasets at report level. But the more I look at the way shared datasets got implemented, the more real-life scenarios I…
Read article
