Direct Reports : SP1

Rather Ripped (Select All in Service Pack 1)

bwelcker — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 01:04:00 GMT

If you've applied Service Pack 1 to your SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services installation (I hope you did, as there are lots of good things in it), you might have noticed the disappearance of "Select All" from the drop down list for multi-valued parameters.


Before SP1	After SP1

Here's the story behind this disappearance and how you can get it back.

With SQL Server 2005, we introduced multi-valued parameters, which allow for you to specify a set of values for a single report parameter. If you think about how multi-valued parameters work against a SQL source, you build a SELECT statement with an IN clause and the values get substituted before it is sent to the server, e.g.

SELECT name FROM customer WHERE country IN (@country)

becomes:

SELECT name FROM customer WHERE customer.country IN ('United States', 'Canada', 'Mexico')

The problem comes from the addition of "Select All" to the dropdown list. In summary, the functionality of the "Select All" checkbox is simply, "check all of the values in the list unless they are already all checked. In this case, then uncheck them all." While this functionality works fine with a small set of values, having several hundred values in an IN clause is not a very efficient SQL statement.

The performance implications for Analysis Services is even more significant; you can select all of the individual members of a dimension as well as the "All" member of a dimension. If your parameter contains the entire member hierarchy (not just a single level), selecting all of the items in the list can cause major performance issues.

A more efficient "Select All" function would actually modify the statement to exclude the clause entirely. Selecting "all countries" in the the above statement would result in:

SELECT name FROM customer

This is quite a bit trickier than the simple parameter substitution logic as you need to maintain the integrity of the statement (What if there is more than one search condition?) Also, we would need to write query parsing routines for each language we supported (T-SQL, MDX, PL-SQL, etc.)

We thought a long time about how to address the performance issues of this feature in SP1. Ideally, you would be able to add a flag to the report definition that would say whether or not to add the "Select All" checkbox. However, as a policy, we don't change the report definition in service packs due to the upgrade and compatibility issues. We also thought about auto-detecting whether a report is against Analysis Services but couldn't really do this without changing the execution SOAP API. We thought about making it a flag in the configuration file but this would force people to decide one way or another for all reports. Finally, we thought about putting "Select All" at the end of the list instead of the beginning.

In the end, we decided to remove it entirely. Big mistake. :)

Although we gave people a chance to give us feedback in the SP1 CTP, we didn't really hear about it until after SP1 was released. Once SP1 was available, we heard from many customers that having the functionality available was more important than the potential performance impact. After revisiting the initial issue, we decided to put it back in the product in the form of a hotfix (as well as in the upcoming SP2). We also learned an important lesson that removing a feature is much harder than adding one.

If you would like to get a patch before SP2 is released, you can contact Support Services and ask for Knowledge Base Article #919478 (the actual KB article has not been published on the web yet).

Green Mind (SP1 Hotfix Rollup)

bwelcker — Thu, 18 May 2006 13:16:00 GMT

You might want to take a look at the just released SQL Server 2005 SP1 hotfix rollup. This package contains a collection fixes that came in too late to fit into the SP1 release process. Unfortunately, the descriptions of some of the bugs in the fix list isn't very obvious, so I've listed the Reporting Services specific fixes below:

Page breaks may not be respected when a table is rendered in Microsoft Office Excel if the report contains tables with the conditions of NoRows=true, NoRowsMessage=null, and the table contains a table header or footer.
When a report contains an image that is external or is a resource in Reporting Services and the report uses the interactive sorting functionality, the image is replaced by a red x.
If you include a subreport in a group footer and you enable the HideDuplicates property in a detail row on a grouping item, Reporting Services raises an internal error when you try to export the report. The error also occurs when you click Print Preview on the Preview tab in Report Designer.
Reporting Services may intermittently display a System.NullReferenceException exception in the ReportSnapshot.EnsureAllStreamsAreClosed procedure. This behavior generates a mini-dump.
When you try to run a linked report that uses the User!UserID variable and the execution properties are set to use Snapshots, you receive the following error message:
3wp!library!1!1/27/2006-13:10:27:: e ERROR: Throwing Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.InternalCatalogException:
If Y-axis margins are enabled and the minimum Y-value of all data points is a "nice" integer value, the Y-axis minimum value will be adjusted to a lower value. For example, the chart control rounds 4.0 to 4 to create a "nice" integer value. However, the generated Y-axis labels are incorrect.
When using a Report Builder Model on an Analysis Services data source, dates in the generated MDX queries may have the month and day parts transposed.

Will You Find Me (SP1 is released)

bwelcker — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 19:48:00 GMT

SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1 is out! It was supposed to be yesterday but the files have taken a while to upload.

The pointer to the English version is here.

Reporting Services changes can be seen here.

Enjoy!

Stands for Decibels (SP1 CTP)

bwelcker — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 01:08:00 GMT

It's been a while since my last post but as you'll see, I've been busy. In addition to thinking about the next major release of Reporting Services, I've been working on getting out the Reporting Services changes for SQL 2005 Service Pack 1. Today we reached a major milestone with the release of the CTP for SP1. You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/ctp_sp1.mspx.

Here are some of the Reporting Services highlights in SP1:

New Features:

Static Images in Report Builder - Now you can add images such as company logos or other graphics to your Report Builder reports.
Data Extension and Query Designer for SAP NetWeaver BI - Through a new graphical query designer, you can easily access InfoCubes and queries in your Reporting Services reports.

Key Fixes:

Analysis Services Integration Fixes - Several bugs have been fixed in the integration of Analysis Services in Report Designer. For example, the report wizard now works correctly with SSAS data sources and the automated parameter generation behavior is more robust.
Model Designer Auto-generation Fixes - Large Databases no longer cause problems for the model auto-generation wizard in the Report Model Designer.
Report Designer Fixes - Complex parameter declarations should no longer cause parsing problems in the SQL Server query designer.

In addition, we also released a CTP of SQL Server Express with Advanced Services. This is the SQL Express version that you have been waiting for (the one with Reporting Services included). There is also a tools download that includes the Report Designer and BI Dev Studio. You can download these from the link above.