Although I am currently getting my bearings after my move to the US and don’t even own a PC or Laptop that can handle PowerPivot (and is not on a boat in the middle of the atlantic ocean), I still wanted to blog about this great announcement: SQL Azure Reporting was announced!
Microsoft SQL Azure Reporting lets you use the familiar on-premises tools you’re comfortable with to develop and deploy operational reports to the cloud. There’s no need to manage or maintain a separate reporting infrastructure, which leads to the added benefit of lower costs (and less complexity). Your customers can easily access the reports from the Windows SQL Azure portal, through a web browser, or directly from your applications.
It has a lot of the same features as SQL Server 2008 R2 like tablices, charts, maps, gauges, sparklines and even deployment straight out of BIDS. Check out his video as well: Introduction to SQL Azure Reporting
Very cool for creating reports on data from the cloud! Don’t forget to sing up to the CTP here
Read more:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlazure/archive/2010/10/28/10082293.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/robertbruckner/archive/2010/10/28/sql-azure-reporting.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlazure/reporting.aspx
Complete press release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/cloud/docs/MSPDCFS.docx
In SQL Server 2008 R2 you can use maps in your reports. After installation you only have the map of the by default. Now we have a Codeplex project to collect maps of the world: http://mapgallery.codeplex.com/
So if you have a map of your country to share, create one yourself or want to download a map yourself head down there and start sharing.
Thanks Sean Boon for the tip.
As most of you probably know in SQL Server 2008 SSRS integrated in SharePoint we had a most annoying bug. When you want to add a drilldown action to another report when using SharePoint you had to add the entire URL to the action. As can be seen in this BOL article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159847.aspx
The list of report names includes all reports in the current report server project. If the drillthrough report is on the report server but is not in the project, type the name of the report. The report name can contain a relative path from this report or an absolute path to the report on the server. An example of a relative path is …\DrillthroughReport\Store. An example of an absolute path is \SalesReports\DrillthroughReport\Store.
On a report server configured in native mode, specify a drilthrough report name without the file extension .rdl.
On a report server configured in SharePoint integrated mode, you must specify the report name in an expression and include the file extension .rdl. For example, =”http://site/subsite/Documents/DrillthroughReport.rdl”.
When i read the what is new in Reporting services 2008 R2 i noticed this sentence:
When working with reports on a SharePoint server integrated with reporting services, subscriptions and drill-through links will now work directly with the linked resources in the document library itself.
When i got home I immediately decided to check it out, and it worked 
So now it you can just add the filename and it works. I noticed something else as well:
They finally embedded the return to previous page in the control as well ! yeahhh.
Two small but great changes who will make my life a little easier
For anyone who works with analysis services and reporting services the SQLCAT team has release a great whitepaper:
Providing strong customer service has helped this customer become the largest commercial bank in Thailand. Always looking for new ways to enhance the services it provides, the bank wanted to study its customer data to help it better determine customer needs, but a reporting system based on manual report development in spreadsheets by using mainframe data (provided in text files) proved cumbersome. The customer wanted to implement a business intelligence solution on the Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 BI suite, including SQL Server Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services, to ensure the proposed solution could meet their customer requirements of the Balance Scorecard (a dynamically updated dashboard of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)), dynamic reports, and dynamic security. The customer has gained a better view into its operations and deeper customer knowledge since deploying its BI solution.This document focuses on the technical concepts and techniques we used to implement reports with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, using an Analysis Services cube as the data source.
It has taught me a lot of new things i did not know .. and I work with this stuff almost every day .. it gives also a great example of how SSRS and SSAS are not really aligned together since you have to do a lot of manual work and change the default MDX to custom MDX.
Check it out here.
Great whitepaper on:
Using Kerberos authentication in a SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services service environment provides a mechanism for mutual authentication between client and server before a secure network connection is established. This article describes how to configure and troubleshoot a Reporting Services service environment to use Kerberos authentication with full delegation.
Download the whitepaper here.
Think you might need this more than you want ..
Just a quick post to let you know that you don’t have to look for the SharePoint Add-in in the RTM version of SharePoint and SQL Server 2008 R2. This is now integrated into the SharePoint prereq installation:
Very good from Microsoft to make this step Although i have installed the RTM on my PC I didn’t notice it until someone asked it on twitter, i found the answer on this blogpost: http://whitepages.sfintelligence.com/?p=98
Was reading through my RSS feeds today and read this excelent post by Robert Bruckner which shows you how you can hide a static column and how you can make sure you get the result you want:
http://blogs.msdn.com/robertbruckner/archive/2010/05/02/report-design-shrinking-hidden-static-columns.aspx
A common question is customer who want their report to be printed automatically in landscape. You can achieve this really easy by using the report properties and click the landscape picture. This will change the width and height from the report to landscape properties.
The printer will automatically detect it to be landscape and print it accordingly.
