Russell Christopher's Semi-Useful BI Musings : SQL Server Reporting Services

Where did the Reporting Services 2008 Add-in for SharePoint go?

russch — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:02:00 GMT

http://performancepointblog.com/2008/08/where-did-the-reporting-services-2008-add-in-for-sharepoint-go/

Proof positive that SSRS 2008 is superior to SSRS 2005

russch — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:53:00 GMT

Cross posting again!

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

SQL Reporting Services: What does that “Thread pool pressure” warning mean?

russch — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:23:00 GMT

Cross-posting:

http://performancepointblog.com/2008/06/sql-reporting-services-what-does-that-thread-pool-pressure-warning-mean/

Packing up and moving to performancepointblog.com

russch — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:05:00 GMT

I had $140 burning a hole in my pocket and saw a great domain name was available, so I've purchased 2 years of hosting for the next incarnation of this blog - performancepointblog.com. The content will be similar to what you've seen here, but with a heavier emphasis on PPS (I have no choice with the name of the blog, right?)

So, this'll be my last post here. If you'd like, feel free to read my inaugural post out there

Problems making web reference to ReportService2006: Unable to import operation "SetReportHistoryOptions"

russch — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:14:00 GMT

Today I needed to write a bit of code to create a model on a SQL 2005 Report server which was running in Sharepoint integrated mode. Boy, what fun I had!

After creating my web reference, I got this error:

Custom tool error: Unable to import WebService/Schema. Unable to import binding 'ReportingService2006Soap' from namespace 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2006/03/15/reporting/reportingservices'. Unable to import operation 'SetReportHistoryOptions'. The XML element named 'ScheduleDefinition' from namespace 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2006/03/15/reporting/reportingservices' is already present in the current scope. C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\MakeAModel\Properties\Settings.settings 1 1 MakeAModel

After much scratching of the head, grumbling, and beating of the breast, I checked our internal bug database and found that this is a known issue (there's no KB article however).

So, I held by breath, cracked open the WSDL and started deleting every element which referred to the SetReportHistoryOption operation since I didn't need this method anyway. After I saved my changes, the error message didn't go away. I shut down VS, reloaded my project, built it, and all was well in my world. I'm attaching my hacked WSDL for your viewing pleasure.

Fun displaying SSRS (integrated) reports using PerformancePoint SQL Server Report viewer

russch — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 17:50:00 GMT

Disclaimer: the post below was written after 24+ hours traveling to India - I was pretty much (very much) out of my mind at the time...

I just spent more than a few minutes messing around with the “SQL Server Report” report viewer in PerformancePoint, and choosing correct values for the Report Server URL and Report URL properties when in SharePoint Integrated mode isn’t, uh…exactly intuitive.

First, a gripe - the Server mode option: You have two choices, “SharePoint Integrated” and “Report Center” modes. Report Center mode? What in the world is that!? As far as I know, there is no way to get a SSRS report to show up in Report Center unless it is already saved in MOSS. So, “Report Center” mode means “SharePoint Integrated” mode to me. It would have been nice we used the same names for these choices (native and integrated) as we do in the SSRS docs! Bleech!

Specifying the Report Server URL is straight forward. Just drop in the location of your Report Server web service, like: http://someMachine/reportserver.

Plugging in the Report URL value is a bit more troublesome. I tried the standard strings like “/ReportLibraryName/ReportName”, etc. Each attempt failed with:

Unable to find report specified by URL. Please verify that both the Server URL and report URL are correct

I finally got sick of plugging in values, and just surfed to http://myMachine/reportserver and browsed to the report in question:

1. Hit the http://someMachine/reportserver vdir of your SSRS installation.

2. Drill down into the folder (in my case http://bi-vpc) that was created when you configured SSRS/MOSS integration and started saving reports. See the screen shot below.

3. Open the folder which represents your Report Center (in my case, “Reports”).

4. Click the link which represents your report library (“ReportsLibrary” for me).

5. Note the name of your report, and don’t forget the .RDL extension at the end!

Put parts 2-5 together, and you have the string you need to plug into Report URL (http://bi-vpc/reports/reportslibrary/CompanySales.rdl - see the screen shot below).

Sheesh – could we have made this any more difficult?

What I like about SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services: The Configuration Manager

russch — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:46:00 GMT

I’ve been slacking a little bit in terms of blogging, but now that CTP6 is out with a bunch of new stuff I can “officially” talk about, I suspect I’ll be a bit more active.

Today while building a VPC image of CTP6, it occurred to me how small improvements really add up. For example, take the Configuration Manager for SSRS 2008. Don’t get me wrong, version 2005 was just fine. But this new one – nice – you can tell someone took some time to figure out how to make life easier for admins.

The whole tool is more wizard-driven and less likely to confused first-time users. For example, the configure database task is substantially more intuitive than it used to be. When teaching classes, I saw users regularly create the ReportServer database, but then forget to actually “join” it. The wizard doesn’t allow you to make this mistake (at least not easily).

The text associated with each option in the tool is thoughtful and concise. Before, you actually had to understand the product already or RTFM to really know what you were doing in Config Manager. Now, everything you need is already right there: easy!

So anyway, I like the Configuration Manager – attention to detail on this fairly minor piece of functionality is a good sign in terms of what the rest of the product does!

SSRS File Share provider in a Workgroup

russch — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:26:00 GMT

Today I was a lurker in a "news to me" conversation about the SSRS file share delivery provider – thought I’d pass this interesting (to me) tidbit along.

When using the file share extension on a box which was NOT part of a domain, the user kept on getting the following error when trying to process a subscription:

Failure writing file: A logon error occurred when attempting to access the file share. The user account or password is not valid.

The user did standard testing and found that the file share was accessible from the console using the same username/password, etc.

Turns out that file share delivery provider doesn’t currently support challenge-response authentication. Instead, It impersonates the user before making the connection to the underlying machine. Because of this, in a workgroup environment, the file share deliveries will not work.

Thanks to Neeraja Divakaruni!

RSPreviewPolicy.config: Change in behavior for BIDS 2008?

russch — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:55:00 GMT

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 your report in BIDS. Essentially, in 2005 if you drop a custom assembly into \PrivateAssemblies (and maybe elsewhere, I haven’t checked), DevEnv.exe gives it FullTrust in BIDS preview even if you don’t add a <CodeGroup> for it like BOL tells you to. I have to admit that I tell all my customers to make sure to add this entry as a best practice, but I rarely do it myself :)

Well, it looks like that habit is about to change. I was trying to reproduce a problem in 2008 for a customer today and they use custom assemblies. I did the standard rssrvpolicy.config mods on my server, dropped the assemblies in question into ReportServer\Bin and \PrivateAssemblies and tried to preview the report in BIDS. I got this error message:

Failed to load expression host assembly. Details: The type initializer for “Some.Assembly.Name.Is.Here” threw an exception.

I spent a good 45 minutes double-checking my work and then for the hell of it went ahead and added a CodeGroup for each of the 3 assemblies I was working with. My report immediately started previewing correctly in BIDS.

So, unless I’m just working with an odd build of SSRS 2008, it looks like we’re all going to have to do a little bit more work in the future when working with custom assemblies.

What does an exported PerformancePoint scorecard look like in Reporting Services report designer?

russch — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:03:00 GMT

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.com/sqlserver/reporting/2003/10/reportdefinition). When you attempt to open the report up with BIDS, you’ll be prompted to upgrade it.

2. If you click the Data tab, you’ll hit the error: “The designer extension ScorecardDPE could not be loaded. Check the configuration file RSReportDesigner.config”

I found there were two ways to (sort of) solve the second problem.

The first workaround is rather old-fashioned. Just keep clicking OK 3-4 times and the error message eventually gives up. Then, switch the query designer into generic mode and dismiss the error message you get there 3-4 times. After that you can run the query with the “!” button, and things work.

If you want to be a little bit more creative, go ahead and edit (carefully, of course) RSReportDesigner.Config. You’ll find the file in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies, and you’ll want to place the following element in the <Designer> block of the file:

Extension Name="ScorecardDPE" Type="Microsoft.ReportingServices.QueryDesigners.VDTQueryDesigner,Microsoft.ReportingServices.QueryDesigners" />

If you go this route, you’ll STILL get an error (“Format of the initialization string does not confirm to the specification starting at index 0”), but you only have to dismiss it once at which point you can go into the generic query designer mode (without additional generic query designer errors to get rid of).

Both solutions aren’t perfect, but then we don’t live in a perfect world, eh?

In terms of modifying the report layout itself, you can change the header colors from “Office 2007 Blue” to whatever you’d like, remove any of the Value, Goal/Status, Trend columns, etc.

Minor idiosyncrasy exporting a PerformancePoint Scorecard to SQL Reporting Services

russch — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:29:00 GMT

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 to the root of my SSRS server’s home folder, as I normally use this area to dump temporary objects. So, I typed in the obligatory “/” symbol to represent “root”.

When I tried to deploy, DD wouldn’t cooperate, telling me:

Could not connect to Reporting Services. Contact an administrator

Turns out you can’t deploy right to root unless you first save the report from DD as an RDL file and then manually import it using Report Manager. When I specified a real folder name (“Adventure Works Sample Reports”, for example) in the Deployment Folder text box, everything was peachy. The status message we get back doesn't really help too much, either - a bit too generic.

Orcas/VS 2008 ReportViewer redist now available

russch — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:16:00 GMT

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-new beauties (your mileage may vary as I haven't tried this myself).

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cc96c246-61e5-4d9e-bb5f-416d75a1b9ef&displaylang=en

SQL Server 2008 "Katmai" CTP5 released

russch — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:18:00 GMT

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

Dell and Microsoft engineer BI offering

russch — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:22:00 GMT

Today at SQL PASS, Dell and Microsoft announced a new set of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing solutions. They include a stack of server hardware, storage arrays, operating system, database and analytics software, management and reporting tools. The entire solution is based on the hardware and software many customers are using right now.

What is really cool about these offerings is they answer the oft-asked question: “what sort of hardware do I need for my DW/BI project?”: Three reference configurations have been created: one terabyte, two terabyte and four terabyte systems for data warehousing databases using SQL Server 2005. Dell and Microsoft worked together to execute various tests and analyze performance results of a sample business intelligence and data warehousing system under load. The testing was designed to validate the platforms for business intelligence and data warehousing, to provide the stability and performance of the hardware systems, and to define the reference configurations I mentioned earlier.

From what I understand, we’ll essentially be including all the goodness in the SQL 2005 BI stack + ProClarity. Now that PerformancePoint 2007 is upon us, the offering will be reconfigured to include PPS at some point in the near future.

More official details should be available at ~~www.dell.com/bi~~ http://www.dell.com/sqlbi a little later today. It doesn't seem like the site is up yet, however.

Update:

Here is a link to the actual 1/2/4 TB reference configuration to see how they did it:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/sitelets/solutions/software/db/microsoft_sql_2005_pr?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

...and another to an article on this event:

http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201808018

At SQL PASS? Don't miss these sessions!

russch — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 04:35:00 GMT

Right now I'm in Ocean Shores, WA for team meetings, so I won't be attending SQL PASS. However, if I was, I'd be sure to hit the SQL CAT sessions being presented:

https://www.sqlpass.org/summit/Lists/2007%20Summit%20Sessions/SQL%20CAT%20Sessions.aspx

These guys know their stuff, and then some.

For you hardcode BI types, I would especially recommend these two:

DBA-416-M Building and Deploying Large Scale SSRS farms using Lessons Learned from customer deployments

DBA-415-M Building & Maintaining large cubes using Lessons Learned from customer deployments

I sat on in "internal-ish" versions of these suckers about two months ago at TechReady5, and they were both really informative.