The trouble with data…

There’s a great resource for those people whose company can’t (or won’t) pay for training in these cash-strapped times

How Do I BI?

Check them out!

I had yet another “incident” today that left me a little flustered whilst trying to do what i would regard as simple stuff with PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer – trying to display an SSRS report on a dashboard page when the report server is in Sharepoint Integrated mode. Fairly simple once you have it worked out but certainly not intuitive and there’s precious little documentation surrounding it.

Anyway… on to the issue & resolution.

To display an SSRS report in a dashboard page, first we need to add a new report, choosing SQL Server Report as the type (see left hand pic below)

Now we can move on to selecting the report server location and the report we want to display. This is not as easy as it sounds – for example in BIDS, we would normally apply our integrated Sharepoint site as the TargetServerURL as per right hand picture above. Note how we use essentially the same URL for the report destination location as we do the TargetServerURL, in my case the is in the format http://myportal.mydomain.local…

So, now we get to PPS and I was expecting things to be pretty similar when faced with the following configuration panel – but no. Actually what we have to

do is to enter the actual reportserver virtual directory URL as opposed to your Sharepoint Portal root site (as you would in BIDS). Notice how the Report Server URL in PPS is in the format

http://reporting.mydomain.local/reportserver

whereas in BIDs for Sharepoint integrated mode it was

http://myportal.mydomain.local

So let’s hope that this is some functionality that becomes more consistent as the disparate platforms (PPS/MOSS/SQL etc) get developed further, as it sure is frustrating to try to second guess these issues when jumping between the different dev environments. So if you are trying to deploy SSRS reports within PPS dashboards to a portal where SSRS is running in Sharepoint Integrated mode and keep getting error messages like the one below – now you know what the issue might be…

Hope this helps…

Having just installed the August CTP of SQL Server 2008 (R2) it was mentioned in the notes that it comes with ReportBuilder 3.0 that has the added functionality of being able to map spatial data (amonst other things).

It IS included with the install, however it’s not immediately obvious where… does not appear on list of newly installed programs etc etc….

If you install the report server you will see that it can be installed “out of the box” as a click-once install from the report server home page Http://yourreportserver/reports (the default) by clicking the icon labelled “New Report in Report Builder”…. simples yes?

Click Once Installation

Now RTM, SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1

Download Here

Summary Functionality:

• Slipstream – You are now able to integrate the base installation with service packs (or Hotfixes) and install in a single step.
• Service Pack Uninstall – You are now able to uninstall only the Service Pack (without removing the whole instance)
• Report Builder 2.0 Click Once capability

As mentioned in the previous post, Report Builder 2.0 will be available in the forthcoming SP1 of SQL Server 2008 (currently in CTP – you can get it here)

In the current version, it is the old  Report Builder 1.0 that is installed and launched when you click the link shown below.

Once you have applied the service pack, the ability to deploy/launch RB 2.0 is available, however there are a couple of configuration steps to fulfil, as following the SP, the launcher will still default to RB 1.0

Firstly, you need to find the report server application location on your server, the default location being

\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services\ReportServer

Within this folder you will see a folder named ReportBuilder

SP1 has made some additional files available here – notice the addition of the following app ReportBuilder_2_0_0_0.application

Now, I can’t tell you if this is the “correct” way to do this, but it worked for me

1. Rename the ReportBuilder.application and ReportBuilderLocalIntranet.application files (I just added .old extension)
2. Rename ReportBuilder_2_0_0_0.application files to be ReportBuilder.application AND ReportBuilderLocalIntranet.application
3. Browse to your ReportServer
4. Try Launching ReportBuilder

You should now see something like this

And so we now can launch RB 2.0 from the report server!

I noticed over at Andrew Fryer’s blog that the CTP of SQL Server 2008 is now available to Technet subscribers – one interesting snippet is that

Report Builder 2 is now a click once install from Report Manager.

Some good information over at SQLCAT

Reporting Services 2008 was able to respond to 3–4 times the total number of users and their requests on the same hardware without HTTP 503 Service Is Unavailable errors compared with Reporting Services 2005, regardless of the type of renderer. In stark contrast, Reporting Services 2005 generated excessive HTTP 503 Service Is Unavailable errors as the number of users and their requests increased, regardless of the report renderer.

Our tests clearly show that the new memory management architecture of the report server enables Reporting Services 2008 to scale very well, particularly on the new four-processor, quad-core processors. With our test workload, Reporting Services 2008 consistently outperformed SQL Server 2005