Russell Christopher's Semi-Useful BI Musings

Say you have a table which contains different currency values - each row in your table contains values for stored with a different currency types (see figure 1). You want to display these values in your report and ensure that each value is displayed with...

Looking for different ways to allow users to browse your cubes? Dundas has an online demo of their very nice Dundas Chart OLAP Services product. Check it out here: http://demos3.dundas.com/olapdemostaging55/ I know this isn’t “breaking news”, and...

After you've gotten the SQL Reporting Services Forms Authentication sample working, the next logical thing to do is access the Web Service itself while your SSRS instance is running under forms auth...but how do you authenticate? Rather than populating...

While playing around with newer builds of Yukon, I noticed two changes from IDW15/CTP15 when it comes to building models: (Thanks to Carolyn Chau!) Up until IDW15/CTP15, you used the IdentifyingAttributes property of an entity to specify which fields...

I have to admit that I fairly regularly query the ReportServer..ExecutionLog table to look at the performance characteristics of my reports rather than using the RS_ExecutionLog_Update.dts package like I'm supposed to. I'm frankly lazy, and don't...

You've installed SSRS 2005, and you're sure that you chose to include the sample files...yet you don't see them on your file system...Where are they? There's one more step you need to take care of...browse to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90...

In SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, you could use the rc:Findstring command to find and highlight a string inside an HTML report. In 2005, the Report Viewer control is now used to display HTML reports in Report Manager and via URL Access. As...

My Personal site is here http://russellchristopher.me The Business Intelligence site for Russell Christopher is here: http://performancepointblog.com

Cross posting again! http://performancepointblog.com/2008/07/proof-positive-that-ssrs-2008-is-superior-to-ssrs-2005/

Hanging up my blue badge and moving to Tableau Software. You can read about my adventures at the company and with the product at Tableau Love

[Thanks to Robert Bruckner, Daniel Reib, Tudor Trufinescu and Mike Schetterer!] Using rsConfig.exe and rsActivate.exe, you can easily set up a reporting farm in which multiple instances of the Report Server web and windows service use the same ReportServer...

Just ran into an interesting little behavior in SQL Management Studio when I tried to create a subscription on a new report: At the time, I didn't realize that I wasn't using stored credentials for the datasource the report utilizes. I went to...

While playing around with report rendering in 2005, I noticed RGDI (for example, in CTP15 use Report Manager to create a subscription using the File Share delivery extension and you'll see "Remote GDI+ file" in the list of render formats). Anyway,...

There are tons of logs in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Reporting Services\LogFiles...what do all those files do? ReportServerService_main:_TimeDateStamp: This log records information about what happens during appdomain recycles, some...

I finally began playing around with how to secure models and/or items within a model, so I needed a "testuser" to launch IE under in order to test my changes. Much to my chagrin, testuser didn't even get the Report Builder button displayed in the Report...

It's time for our own press release now, thank you! In the link below, you'll see that today Jeff Raikes will announce that we are acquiring OfficeWriter from SoftArtisans - This is a huge win for folks who want to render reports to Word and/or use...

Carl Rabler et al have just released a really nice looking best practives article on how to resolve query perf bottlenecks. Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=975C5BB2-8207-4B4E-BE7C-06AC86E24C13&displaylang=en

Just got an invite from Microsoft Connect to download the November CTP of SQL 2008....you can, too! http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=3BF4C5CA-B905-4EBC-8901-1D4C1D1DA884&displaylang=en

A new version of the ReportViewer controls has been dropped for use w/ Orcas-created applications. From what I understand, you can also use these in 2005 as long as you remove the old 9.0 references and replace them with references to these brand-spanking...

The Microsoft Knowledge Base article 941749 explains (among other things) how to remove PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer. However, it appeared to me that the steps (“Method 1” and “Method 2”) were semi-cosmetic : We’re really not explicitly told how...

Today I started playing around with the ability to export/deploy PPS scorecards to SSRS: It’s actually a pretty cool piece of work! I did run into one problem up which I’m documenting here to save someone else some time. I wanted to deploy my report...

I was curious what would happen when I opened an RDL file created by PerformancePoint in Report Designer, so I tried it. Here is what I discovered: 1. For whatever reason, PPS exports RDL using the SSRS 2000 RDL spec (xmlns= http://schemas.microsoft...

For those who play around with custom assemblies in SQL Reporting Services, it’s pretty common knowledge that it is not necessary to add a <CodeGroup> element for your custom assembly in RSPreviewPolicy.config in order to use it while previewing...

If you need to build a very complex query that returns a matrix with dynamic columns and rows from T-SQL, you might want to take a look at this new project posted on CodePlex : SQL Server 2-D Matrix Builder http://www.codeplex.com/SQL2DMatrixBuilder...

Today I was playing around with stacking SSAS on top of Teradata. Essentially I have AdventureWorks DW moved over into Teradata and I’m trying to build a dumbed-down version of the AdventureWorks cube against it. Things went fairly well while my partitions...