Robert Bruckner's Advanced Reporting Services Blog : Conferences

See You at PASS 2009 Summit

Robert M. Bruckner — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:10:00 GMT

The PASS Community Summit 2009 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 knowledge available.

In addition to SQL Server MVPs and numerous SQL Server gurus, there will be many people of the SQL Server product group in attendance. I would encourage you to stop by at the product booth and the Ask The Experts areas. This is a great opportunity to provide your feedback and discuss your questions face-to-face with members of the product development team, including myself and several of my colleagues from the Reporting Services team.

I will also present during two sessions at PASS this week:

On Wednesday I will represent the Reporting Services team with demos during the traditional “BI Power Hour” session.
On Thursday I will present during Paul Turley’s sessions on “Super Reports: Patterns & Recipes”. My contents will focus on several of the new SQL Server 2008 R2 features available in the upcoming November CTP and show how they will solve several of your important reporting scenario requirements.

Hope to see you at PASS!

Multi-Player Gaming in RS (aka BI Power Hour 2008)

Robert M. Bruckner — Thu, 21 May 2009 04:25:00 GMT

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 and various tools of the BI stack can be useful.

In past years, Reporting Services made a number of successful contributions to these events, such as Hangman, report manager as report, etch-a-sketch, mastermind, an executive dashboard (aka tic-tac-toe), and others.

Throughout last year, we showed several variations of a multi-player game that we shall call “Sea Battle”. The goal of the game is to sink all of your opponent ships (for example, a Battleship), before the opponent has a chance to find and sink your ships. The faster you click, the better your chances of winning :)

The overall theme of the report was about interesting new data visualization features in Reporting Services 2008. It uses charts with dynamic drill through actions, as well as data point tooltips. Furthermore, a small matrix acts essentially as a data-driven grid control next to the chart to show your own ship positions and the opponent’s hits and misses. The overall health status of the opponent's ships is shown using a gauge control with a custom pointer with an image to simulate a rising water level, as a ship sustains more and more hits.

Successfully sinking a ship is rewarded with a nice animated explosion. The really fun part is the multi-player aspect – we use a basic way of matching up two report users so they can play against each other by simply interacting with their report on a report server.

While Reporting Services was clearly not designed as a gaming platform, this demonstration of the product's flexibility brought out the competitive spirit in the SQL Server BI team. When I made an initial version available for limited beta-testing on an internal report server, the news spread quickly and we immediately had more than 50 people playing, and frantically clicking on the chart’s drill through links trying to win against their human opponents. This created quite a bit of load on the report server that is also used by hundreds of other users, and provided a nice stress test scenario :)

Enough said. I know you want to participate in the fun and play yourself!

Instructions to setup the demo on your own RS 2008 report server:

Unzip the attachment
Restore the database backup (SeaBattle.bak) on a SQL Server database server
Create a new Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 report project, add the shared data source (SeaBattle.rds), and the two reports of the zip file to the project
Publish the project to a RS 2008 report server
Use stored credentials on the shared data source.
I strongly recommend using stored credentials. That way, only the stored user needs access to the SeaBattle database and you won’t run into any potential integrated security double-hop issues.
In report manager, hide the “SeaBattle” report, so that users just see the “SeaBattle – Start new game” report. Don’t run the SeaBattle report directly; always use the start new game report.
I recommend playing the game using the http://MachineName/reportserver URL, not through report manager, if you want faster response time and better chances of winning :)
Better yet, you could quickly build a small Winforms application, using the Visual Studio 2008 ReportViewer control in remote mode and connect to the report server.

Hope you are going to enjoy this Power Hour demo!

Q&A and disclaimers:

Multi-player matching is really basic
The first user that starts the report establishes a new game, the second user that enters is automatically linked with the first user. Since there is no concept of game session implemented, you can end up with abandoned sessions if one of the players stops playing, or starts a new game.
Reporting Services was not designed as a gaming platform
This results in some limitations in the game design. Furthermore, the demo evolved over time with little bits added here and there – if I were to rebuild the backend database and the report from scratch, it would have a somewhat cleaner design.
Could this be built using a local mode report viewer control?
Yes, but it is probably an exercise for more advanced developers. Basically, you would build a local mode report viewer application with its own data retrieval, and just access the SeaBattle database on a common SQL Server.

SQL Server 2008 R2, Tech Ed 2009

Robert M. Bruckner — Thu, 14 May 2009 10:20:00 GMT

I have been pretty busy lately – working on SQL Server 2008 R2, which is the official name for the next release, formerly known as SQL Server 'Kilimanjaro'.

Earlier today at the Tech Ed 2009 Conference, Thierry D’hers demonstrated one of the many projects I have been working on recently – it is our cool new Reporting Services Power Hour demo, unveiled at the 5th Annual Business Intelligence Power Hour at Tech Ed. It was a lot of fun putting it together! You can read a brief summary and first impressions of the demo on Teo’s blog. Stop by at the Reporting Services booth at Tech Ed if you want to see more about it.

Updates: A video of this new Reporting Services Power Hour demo is now available. I also made up on my promise to provide details and a download for our highly popular Power Hour demo from last year.

Speaking at SQL Server Energy Conference

Robert M. Bruckner — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 04:10:00 GMT

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.

Speakers include well-known industry experts such as Rafal Lukawiecki, Al Comeau, Itzik Ben-Gan, Dejan Sarka, Ramesh Meyyappan, Maciej Pilecki, and Kevin Ashby. I already look forward to presenting three sessions about Reporting Services:

Report Authoring with Report Builder and Reporting Services
Reporting Services 2008 - Server Architecture and Scalable Reporting
Reporting Services "Power Hour"

While the presentation material will be in English, I haven't decided yet whether I am going to speak in Austrian/German ;-) or English. Either way, it is going to be fun and hopefully very useful to attendees of my sessions. Also, feel free to introduce yourself at the conference, and let me know what further technical Reporting Services topics you would like to see covered on my blog.

See You at PASS Summit ...

Robert M. Bruckner — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 03:45:00 GMT

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 knowledge available - take a look at the session grid.

In addition to SQL Server MVPs and numerous SQL Server gurus, there will be several hundred people of the SQL Server product group in attendance. I would also encourage you to stop by at the product booth and the Ask The Experts areas. This is a great opportunity to provide your feedback and discuss your questions face-to-face with members of the product development team, including myself and several of my colleagues from the Reporting Services team.

Reporting from Data in the Cloud (aka SSRS and SDS at PDC)

Robert M. Bruckner — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 06:30:00 GMT

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 - building those demos was a lot of fun!

How did we do this? We built a small custom data extension for SDS utilizing the data source extensibility framework in Reporting Services. This data extension will allow you to connect to SDS authorities and containers via HTTP SOAP to extract data sets, and build rich reports using standard tools like Report Designer / Report Builder and deploy the reports to Report Manager.

As part of SQL Services Labs (also announced at PDC today), developers can now download the custom extension and configure it against their on-premise SSRS 2008 installation. More information, including the download, is available under the Reporting section of SQL Services Labs.

Enjoy!

See You at Business Intelligence Conference 2008 ...

Robert M. Bruckner — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:45:00 GMT

The 2nd Annual Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference has lots of great information and networking opportunities to offer! If you are there, I recommend to attend several of the Reporting Services breakout sessions, chalk talks, and hands on labs offered throughout the conference. It provides you the latest on Reporting Services 2008 and future directions, opportunities to try out functionality in labs, and to talk directly to members of the product development team, including myself.

I will be presenting the following two chalk talks:

Oct. 6th, 12:30 PM, CT-29: Creating Richly Formatted Reports with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, Room 614
Oct. 8th, 10:45 AM, CT-27: SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services: Report Design Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices for Performance and Scalability, Room 614

In addition, you will likely be able to catch me directly at several more Reporting Services sessions:

Oct. 6th, 4:15 PM, SQL Server Reporting Services Scalability Lessons Learned, Room: 6C
Oct. 8th, 12:00 PM, Informal Ask-The-Experts in the Microsoft Product Pavilion / Reporting Services Kiosk Area
Oct. 8th, 1:30 PM, Instructor-Led Labs for Report Builder 2.0

Besides those sessions, I plan to also spend several hours on Monday and Wednesday in the Microsoft Product Pavilion / Reporting Services area to be available for your questions, alongside several other colleagues from the Reporting Services product team. Please feel free to stop by, say hello, and bring your questions and/or feedback on Reporting Services! The conference is going to be a lot of fun, and I am really looking forward to meeting you and hearing your questions and feedback!

Finally, one of the highlights is certainly also going to be "The 4th Annual BI Power Hour" on Oct. 7th, 4:15 PM. I prepared and built the Reporting Services demo for it with a little help from my esteemed colleague Chris; unfortunately I won't be able to make it to the actual BI Power Hour session this year due to other obligations. Anyway, believe me that you don't want to miss that event. You may see elements in the Power Hour demo that you probably didn't think are possible in a Reporting Services report ... :-)

Update:

A summary of the BI Power Hour demos was posted on the BI blog, mentioning our Reporting Services demo in particular detail.