I wanted to give some props to MVP Grant Paisley who has setup a site called Report Surfer , where you can directly view, share, and download sample Reporting Services reports. I met Grant a few months back when he visited Redmond. He was very interested...

I recently provided a tip to my Australian colleague David Lean to successfully solve a small report design challenge with tables and charts that use conditional formatting. The specific goal was to dynamically calculate and assign a color shade so...

I wanted to point out two Reporting Services utilities built by our MVPs and user community that you may find very useful. BIDS Helper is a CodePlex project: http://www.codeplex.com/bidshelper In past releases, the focus has been on significantly...

If you used the CSV renderer in previous releases of Reporting Services, you might want to take another look in RS 2008. We listened to your feedback: not only does CSV rendering consume significantly less resources and is faster in most cases, the CSV...

We plan to release significantly updated and improved versions of both the Winforms and ASP.NET Report Viewer controls in Visual Studio 2010 . This is going to include the long awaited local mode support for the new report processing engine , originally...

The fourth and final technical note " Reporting Services Performance Optimizations " in our series on Building and Deploying Large Scale SQL Server Reporting Services Environments is now available on SQLCAT.com. The focus of this final technical note...

You are probably now thinking, of course my report shows the right data! Ok, but is it fast (enough)? My esteemed colleague Dean Kalanquin started blogging recently. He has been working in databases for a long time, and has gained great experience...

In a previous posting, I explained the new ExecutionLog2 view in Reporting Services 2008: how to utilize it to measure report execution performance, identify report candidates for optimizations, and verify the impact of the latter. I also included two...

As an administrator of a report server, you may occasionally ask yourself the question of what kind of reports are published in terms of their particular feature usage. For example: · Usage of Custom Report Items (CRIs) You plan to upgrade from...

There are several options for monitoring performance of a report server. The fourth article in our technical note series on performance and scalability covers information for optimizing entire report servers . Besides performance counters , analyzing...

Custom Report Item in Reporting Services 2005 This server extensibility feature introduced in Reporting Services 2005 (RS 2005) provides the ability to develop custom report items for embedding in reports. Examples of resources available that provide...

Reporting Services 2008 RS 2008 includes full support for Teradata-based report models. You can create and use semantic models based off Teradata similar to how Reporting Services already supports this for SQL Server, Analysis Services, and Oracle...

Want to get an overview, recommendations for good books and other resources, and the latest information about Reporting Services 2008? Check out our MSDN aggregation page for Reporting Services . Looking for the latest downloads for Reporting Services...

Our documentation team made the latest RDL specification available on the Reporting Services site: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/reporting.aspx The 2008 RDL specification is available as XPS and as PDF document. Older versions of the...

One of the new chart features in Reporting Services 2008 is the ability to add chart series calculated from another series. This is accomplished by right-clicking an existing series (data point value) and selecting "Add Calculated Series ..." from the...

Over the past few months, I contributed to a series of technical notes by my esteemed colleagues Denny and Lukasz on http://sqlcat.com/ . The technical notes provide guidance on how to build, deploy, and optimize large scale SQL Server Reporting Services...

The SQL Server Energy 2008 Conference takes place in Vienna, Austria, on November 25th and 26th. The conference covers a broad spectrum of SQL Server 2008 technologies, and provides great information on how to make the most effective use of new features...

The PASS Community Summit 2008 is a don't-miss event for Microsoft SQL Server professionals. Whether you are a database administrator or a business intelligence professional, I believe you will benefit from the most up-to-date and comprehensive SQL Server...

My colleagues Sean Boon and Alex Gorev recently started their own blogs with focus on data visualization. You can expect to see more postings on their blogs in future on how to effectively utilize Reporting Services 2008 charts and gauges to make your...

You may have been in this situation before - you designed a chart based on a particular dataset and everything looks great. However, later the data volume increases, or new categories dynamically show up in your data source, and there is not enough horizontal...

One of the demos shown at Monday's PDC keynote by Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia was Reporting Services with data stored in SQL Data Services (SDS) in the cloud. Besides the keynote, there are several more sessions throughout PDC featuring Reporting Services...

One of the changes we included in Cumulative Update #1 for SQL Server 2008 ( CU1 download link ) is automatic full font embedding and subsetting for Unicode characters in Reporting Services 2008 PDF rendering . While a similar code change is now available...

One of the small new features in Reporting Services 2008 that has not been widely publicized, is the ability to directly reference dataset fields and dataset aggregations from expressions in the page header and page footer. You can accomplish this by simply dragging a dataset field directly into the page header/footer area of the report, or by manually writing expressions.

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One of the projects the data visualization group within the Reporting Services team has been working on is building stand-alone ASP.NET and Windows Forms Chart Controls for the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, similar to what has been already...

In a previous posting, I discussed dataset execution order in Reporting Services. In this posting, I will provide a few tips for situations where you or your report users are wondering what is the actual query executed by Reporting Services. While...