SQL Server 2008 was released to manufacturing (RTM) today (see press release ). You can download it on MSDN Subscriber Downloads and TechNet Subscriber Downloads . Either search for SQL Server 2008 or navigate under Servers then to SQL Server 2008...

You may have heard by now that the report processing engine of Reporting Services 2008 works significantly different underneath the covers, compared to previous releases. While I plan to dive into more technical details in future postings, I wanted to...

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...

Today SQL Server 2012 RC0 was released. You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28145 . This post summarizes much of the new functionality in Power View with RC0. Related information: TechNet page and TechNet...

A few months ago, leading up to the release of RC0 of SQL Server 2008, I was involved in working with the SQL Server Customer Advisory Team . They were investigating and comparing the scalability of Reporting Services 2005 and Reporting Services 2008...

At the traditional annual “BI Power Hour” sessions, several teams that contribute to the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform show off their technology in a fun way. It is about demonstrating, in perhaps unusual ways, of how business intelligence...

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...

You selected "Repeat header rows on each page" or "Keep header rows visible while scrolling" in the tablix properties dialog, but it doesn't seem to work as expected? You might want to try the following four steps if you are using a "table"-style layout...

The Reporting Services demo during the " BI Power Hour " session at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference was a lot of fun and well received. My colleague Carolyn Chau did great on stage presenting the demo we had put together. In my chalk talk...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Introduction SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services (SSRS 2008) features an on-demand report processing engine . This on-demand architecture has a number of key advantages over the processing engine design that existed in previous major releases. The most...

A Reporting Services report can contain multiple dataset definitions. By default, datasets are executed in parallel . Now, in some situations you may not want this parallel query execution behavior - for example: Your data source system cannot handle...

Tablix is the new underlying flexible data region and grouping structure introduced in Reporting Services 2008. Among other features, it enables asymmetric layouts, as demonstrated in the thumbnail screenshot below. If you use a list, table, matrix...

Report Builder 2.0 RC1 is now available on Microsoft Download Center. Use this link for download . RC1 delivers improvements in the following areas compared to RC0: Easy to use wizards for creating table, matrix and chart data regions. Support...

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...

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...

In case you missed it in the recent wave of SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Office release announcements, Visual Studio 2010 was released in mid April and includes significantly enhanced ReportViewer controls. In server mode, the ReportViewer control can...

At the traditional annual “BI Power Hour” sessions several teams contributing to the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform show off their technology in a fun way.  It is about demonstrating, in perhaps unusual ways, of how business intelligence...

When deploying Reporting Services in an environment that requires more than one server, such as a scale-out deployment or a deployment in a server farm, you may need to configure Kerberos authentication. Kerberos is particularly important when you require...

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...

Tablix enables the separation of data groupings and layout header areas.  A stepped layout can help with horizontal spacing, because nested groups can then share the same horizontal space, which was previously not possible in a matrix layout. ...

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...