Today was supposed to be the birthday of the SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance Toolkit by Microsoft Press but it's not available with retailers, such as Amazon, yet. I guess a couple or so more days as the book is finding its way to resellers. As with the 2005 version, I was privileged to work together with Erik Veerman and Dejan Sarka…
Issue: An interesting question popped today on the discussion list about overwriting the default of a cascading parameter. In this particular case, the report has two parameters: Frequency and HireDate. The HireDate parameter is dependent on the Frequency parameter. Specifically, when the user changes the Frequency parameter, custom code changes the default of the HireDate parameter. Sounds easy, right? Well, not so fast. This requirement…
As I mentioned in a previous blog, one very important SSRS enhancement in the recently released SQL Server 2008 SP1 is Report Builder 2.0 ClickOnce. This lets you reconfigure the native and SharePoint integration modes to let the user use Report Builder 2.0 instead of Report Builder 1.0. Note that in SharePoint integration mode, installing SP1 only is not enough. That's because there are actually…
Sometimes, it's better just to reset. I came across an issue concerning processing a partition whose containing measure group joins a dimension via another reference dimension. Specifically, when I attempt to process the partition, the server would error out with: The binding for the 'dimension key' column is not a ColumnBinding type What made this issue interesting is that I was able to repro the…
Here is a great tip thanks to Greg Galloway who pointed me to the Steve Novoselac's excellent blog. By default, Excel 2007 PivotTable stacks (hierachizes) the attributes on the report even if they are from the same dimension. For example, let's say the user wants to slice by the product hierarchy but want also some additional product attributes, such as the product color, size, etc.…
The Report Builder technology made its debut in SQL Server 2005. It targeted business users who wanted to author their own (ad-hoc) reports but they were not necessarily technically savvy, meaning that no technical knowledge about database schemas or query syntax was assumed. The Report Builder technology includes a Report Builder Model and Report Builder Client. Similar to other ad-hoc reporting tools, such as Impromptu,…
Today, a co-worker declared a victory after struggling a few days to get Reporting Services 2008 SharePoint integration mode going on Windows Server 2008 (aka Longhorn). I helped of course J It all started with access denied error when attempting to deploy reports to SharePoint. Navigating to the WSS Central Admin Operations page would reveal however that the Reporting Services section is missing. After n-installs…
Issue: You want an MDX query that returns measures on rows and calculated members on columns. You get The Measures hierarchy already appears in the Axis0 axis error. That's because calculated members added to measures are treated as measures and you cannot have the same dimension (Measures in this case) on different axes. Solution: Let's point out that the above-mentioned error doesn't occur if you…
I had a head-scratcher the other day. All of a sudden, SQL Server Management Studio stopped showing the cubes in the dropdown of the MDX Query tab although MDX queries and reports would execute just fine. The Reporting Services MDX Query Designer would complain with "No cubes found" error when I attempted to launch it from the dataset properties. This strange behavior coincided with installing…
One of my TechEd 2009 session proposals got approved. The session is tentatively named Reporting Services 2008 Tips and Tricks, How-to, and Beyond. I am planning to cover solutions to common questions and challenges that span the three phases of the reporting lifecycle: authoring, management and delivery. I hope you can attend my session If you planning to attend TechEd 2009 USA. Shoot me a…