SQLBI - Marco Russo : Reporting Services

Microsoft BI Security White Paper #ssas #powerpivot #sharepoint #ssrs

Marco Russo (SQLBI) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:47:00 GMT

There is a new whitepaper from Microsoft, Microsoft BI Authentication and Identity Delegation, which describes all the authentication and delegation scenarios with Microsoft BI technologies:

Personal BI Scenarios (Excel)
Team BI Scenarios (SharePoint)
Corporate BI Scenarios (Reporting Services, Analysis Services)
Federated BI Scenarios (Multi-Forest AD, Extranet, Cloud)

This is the new reference whitepaper to correctly plan and configure the security environment of a BI solution based on Microsoft BI stack.

BonaVista Dimensions used as a report service

Marco Russo (SQLBI) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:13:00 GMT

Recently I have seen a long demo of BonaVista Dimensions . It is a product that is able to create reports and, most important dashboards. You can use it also without SQL Server and Analysis Services, just by importing data in a local cube file that you...(read more)

The Microsoft BI Roadmap: BISM, UDM and Beyond

Marco Russo (SQLBI) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:05:00 GMT

Microsoft recently announced a new roadmap for its BI architecture. The next version of SQL Server, codenamed “Denali”, is going to introduce a new semantic model named BISM (Business Intelligence Semantic Model). Analysis Services will host it and it...(read more)

Real Report Builder 2008 improvements for Analysis Services

Marco Russo (SQLBI) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:38:23 GMT

Brian Welcker (who is leaving SSRS team - good luck Brian!) has announced a long explanation of the Report Builder 2008 positioning.

For me (and all of you who live in the multidimensional business...) the most important part of the post is this simple sentence:

[...] However, for folks building reports against Analysis Services cubes, auto-generating a model is no longer required.

This is really a good news who will drive Report Builder adoption in SSAS shops. I still haven't tested Report Builder 2008 very much, but this news will help me to find the time to do it.

Rich TextBox in SQL Server Reporting Services 2008

Marco Russo (SQLBI) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:32:45 GMT

I'm attending a session about SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 where I've seen one of the mostly wanted missing features of previous versions of Reporting Services: it is the Rich TextBox component, that can embed placeholders to compose text with data producing reports for contracts and documentation.

The RDL still maintain a complete separation between text and data (and formatting!) so it is a nightmare to write by hand (but I don't know anyone designing reports in RDL) but very good for a report designer to manage. Some more issue if you already have your own format for a "mail merge" text, because you have to parse your text and covert it into a more structured RDL, but it shouldn't be so hard to do.

Developing a customized reporting solution based on SSRS

Marco Russo (SQLBI) — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 14:56:02 GMT

I just attended the session named "Applied Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services" held by of Teo Lachev . Teo developed a complex solution that allow an end user to build its own reports with financial data, using Reporting Services as a back-end engine but defining its own custom report designer. While someone may object that there is not so much flexibility in report definition with this solution (you have several constraint in report designer), it could be appreciated by the many existing users that only want to say what data want to see into a report, while they didn't care much about possible layout customization. In reality the report looks very good for that kind of users.

The interesting part is that Teo developed an object model to abstract the underlying RDL that simpliefies an application that needs to deal with such a format. That model persist RDL through XML serialization and (as Teo hope) it would be useful if Microsoft would publish an "official" object model upon RDL.

Teo also showed other techniques he used in his solution, like retrieving data using CLR stored procedures, subclassing Report Viewer control to implement best practices and rules and finally how to extend reports with custom code (i.e. to use particular formats for numeric values based on locale of the user executing the report instead than a fixed format defined for the report - not a usual case, but if you need it... it's useful to centralize all that logic in a single assembly).

It's interesting to see a completely different approach like this using Reporting Services 2005.

Reporting Services required features

Marco Russo (SQLBI) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:45:00 GMT

Almost ten years ago (...ouch!) I visited Australia and I had a real love for Sydney.

I got these memories tonight because I found a detailed list when I was looking for some existing request for new features in Reporting Services. One is the Rich TextBox feature. Another is the lack of support for styles: there are many possible implementations, like ASP.NET 2.0 master pages. I found these suggestions on a page full of requests, very well detailed, supported by a Sydney company that also maintain a similar list for many other products very dense but also really understandable. Great work, guys!

I hope that Microsoft will improve support for embedded images into http://connect.microsoft.com too, allowing to easily describe a trouble or a requested feature.