Tudor's WebLog

long overdue post - book & bye SQL reporting services

2007-11-08T09:48:00Z

About 2 years ago, as we were wrapping up SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005, I wrote a reporting services chapter in Sams' SQL Server 2005 unleashed book, As I haven't heard from the editors for a long time, I assumed it had shared the same ill-fate with many software projects - nothing I would have any first-hand experience with J.

It bounced back, however, and was eventually published this spring. They have saved the best for lastJ, so go directly to Chapter 49 and get some hands-on info on using SQL reporting services, and the Visual Studio report controls, complete with working code.

Enjoy...

This is also the last post on Reporting Services you will see on this blog. About 1 year ago, I decided I should try something new, and joined the then-newly created AdCenter team - Microsoft's online advertising unit.

I am involved in AdCenter fraud-prevention efforts and in relevance and infrastructure work - mostly things you notice only when they don't workJ. I might write some posts about AdCenter as I get more time.

Reporting Services in SQL Express now available

2006-04-19T19:53:00Z

The wait is over. The new edition of SQL Express - (free) that includes Reporting Services is available. Look here for download details.

For a list of features available in all SQL editions see this article

Happy reporting!

Sample on ReportViewer controls with Object data sources containing nested objects

2006-04-10T21:33:00Z

I made a couple of changes in the object data source sample on www.gotreportviewer.com to illustrate the use of nested objects in report fields

I have added a ProductSales sub-class to the Product class. ProductSales has two fields: Quantity and Price.

In the report - you can reference them via:

Fields!Sales.Value.Quantity and Fields!Sales.Value.Price

You can similarly use multiple levels of object nesting, for example:

Fields!Sales.Value.Customer.Name

See attachment for details.

New report viewer developer site

2005-11-03T20:39:00Z

Great starting point for using the new Report Viewer controls in Visual Studio 2005

http://www.gotreportviewer.com/

Reporting Services 2005 advanced deployment options

2005-11-03T20:16:00Z

Deploying Report Manager on an Internet-Facing Web Server

I have seen a lot of questions on deploying Reporting Services in an internet facing configuration. In SQL Reporting Services 2005, this is easier than in the previous version, but still not as seamless as we would have liked.

In SQL Server Reporting Services 2005, you can install a report server and Report Manager on separate computers. For example, you can install report mananger on a internet facing machine, and report server inside the firewall.

If you use this configuration, know that the following features will be unavailable:

· Report drillthroughs in Web archive (MHTML), Excel, and HTML3.2 formats will fail to connect

· Links in report server e-mail subscriptions will fail on the connection.

· Report Builder will not be available

· You will either need a custom authentication extension (to support forms authentication) or you will have to enable Kerberos and delegation, if you want to support Windows authentication.

To use Windows authentication and configure Kerberos, you will have to follow the (not so simple) steps at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/security/tkerbdel.mspx

To configure Forms based authentication, you will have to use the instructions included with the Reporting Services 2005 samples at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/downloads/samples/default.aspx

To deploy Report Manager and a report server on separate computers, you must run SQL Server setup twice, once on each computer.

1. Install the first report server instance in "install but do not configure" mode on an Internet-facing Web server. Choose only Reporting Services (make sure that Report Manager is included as a feature component). After setup is finished, disable the report server instance so that only Report Manager is available. You can use the SQL Server Surface Area Configuration tool to disable report server operations on this server, and/or you can remove the /reportserver virtual directory.

2. Install the second report server instance in "install but do not configure" mode on a Web server behind the firewall. Run the Reporting Services Configuration tool and connect to the local report server you just installed. Configure the report server virtual directory, specify service accounts, and create and configure the database. The report manager virtual directory is not needed on this machine.

3. On the Web server that hosts Report Manager, edit the RSWebApplication.config file to specify a URL to the report server.

· Remove the value for ReportServerVirtualDirectory.

· In ReportServerUrl, type a fully qualified domain name for the report server instance behind the firewall. For example:

<ReportServerUrl>https://www.myserver.com/public/reportserver</ReportServerUrl>

Configuring Proxy Settings in Web.config Files

In SQL Server 2005, Reporting Services includes a Web.config setting that allows Report Manager to bypass the proxy server when sending requests to a local report server that is installed on the same computer.

The Web.config setting is the System.NET defaultProxy network setting. By default, defaultProxy is disabled in the Web.config file for Report Manager. This is the recommended configuration when Report Manager and the report server are deployed together on the same computer.

If you are running Report Manager on a separate computer, you should change the defaultProxy setting to enabled="true".

If you upgraded from SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, the Report Manager Web.config file does not include the defaultProxy configuration setting. You can add and set the defaultProxy setting to bypass the proxy server for installations where Report Manager and report server are running on the same computer. Copy the following configuration settings into the Report Manager Web.config file:

...

<system.net>

</system.net>

</configuration>

For more information about these settings, see "Configuring Internet Applications" and "defaultProxy Element (Network Settings)" in the Microsoft .NET Framework Developer's Guide.

Adding security groups to Reporting services security doesn't take effect until IIS is restarted

2004-10-28T03:56:00Z

If you grant Reporting services permissions (via http://servername/Reports | folder properties | security) to Windows security groups, you may find out that people belonging to those groups don't immediately get the expected access rights.

For performance reasons IIS caches authorization tokens. For more details on how to configure it, see the following KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q152526/

Secure reports, parameters and User!UserID

2004-07-21T05:18:00Z

I have seen enough questions on how to protect parameters passed to reports to warrant a blog entry.

Let’s say if you want to integrate a report containing HR data in your application. Let’s assume the data in the HR database is keyed by the EmployeeID field.

Your application will figure out the value of EmployeeID for the current user, and you could pass EmployeeID as a report parameter that’ll drive its queries.

The problem with this approach is that your users could change the parameter and pass in another EmployeeID, which leads to unwanted information disclosure. You can try to hide the parameter, so it will not show up in the report viewer toolbar, or not show the toolbar at all, but parameter values will still show up in the URLs generated in the report.

Then you may start thinking about making the values random – so they’re harder to guess, or encrypt their values, etc, etc…

The truth is, you should never make security decisions based on report parameters. Report parameters are eminently spoof-able, hiding them will not work for sophisticated users, and custom-made encryption are seldom strong enough to withstand a serious hacker.

Instead of using parameters, base your security decisions on User!UserID. UserID is populated as the result of the authentication mechanism so it is inherently more reliable than parameters.

In the example above, you can add code in your report that retrieves the EmployeeID based on UserID.

Note:

If you can’t establish a relationship between your user’s Windows accounts and your report data, you can implement a custom authentication extension as described here. The value for UserID will then be determined by your custom auth extension.

Reporting Services SP1 and rsInvalidDataSourceCredentialSetting errors

2004-07-19T20:51:00Z

If you upgraded to RS SP1 and noticed some of your reports that used to work fail now with the following error: “The current action cannot be completed because the user data source credentials that are required to execute this report are not stored in the report server database. (rsInvalidDataSourceCredentialSetting)” here is the what to do:

if your report’s data sources do not support authentication – for instance, an anonymous web service, an XML/CSV file, Microsoft Access data source, then use rsconfig –e –u –p to configure the unattended execution account. Make sure to use a low privilege user account. Access to the data sources will be made as that user account.
if your report’s data sources support authentication – for instance Microsoft SQL Server data sources, or other RDBMS, switch to using the one of the other credentials options, as they provide better security.

Credentials stored securely in the report server

User name:

Password:

Use as Windows credentials when connecting to the data source

Impersonate the authenticated user after a connection has been made to the data source

Windows NT Integrated Security

Credentials are not required

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services - measuring and improving performance

2004-06-28T20:57:00Z

§ Optimize your report queries. Usually the bulk of report execution time is spent executing queries and retrieving results. If you are using SQL Server, tools such as Query Analyzer and Profiler can help you optimize your queries and Database Tuning Advisor can suggest better indexes for your database.

§ Measure: The Report Server ExecutionLog table contains data on reports performance. The following query can give you a quick look at how long it took to execute certain reports, and where the bulk of the time was spent. TimeDataRetrieval contains the number of ms. spent getting data from the report's data source(s).

use ReportServer

Select * from ExecutionLog with (nolock) order by TimeStart DESC

Make sure to include the “nolock” hint. The ExecutionLog table is used by the RS runtime and locking it can severely degrade your server’s performance.

A better solution is to run the DTS package that comes with Reporting Services. It will move data out of the runtime tables into a set of reporting tables. That way you are minimizing the amount of interference with the RS runtime. You can also take advantage of the built-in reports based on the execution logs, and/or build your own reports.

§ If you don’t need data in your report, don’t retrieve it. Levering database operations such as filtering, grouping, and aggregates can reduce the amount of data that is processed in the report, improving performance.

§ Keep your reports modest in size and complexity. Do users really want to look at a 1,000 page report?

§ If performance is extremely bad even for single users, check the Application Restarts counter in the ASP.NET category; some antivirus software is known to “touch” configuration files, thus causing expansive Application Domain restarts in the report server web service. For more information, search http://support.microsoft.com/ for articles relating to “antivirus and ASP.NET”.

§ If performance is slow on the first web service access after there have not been any accesses for a certain time period, disable the idle timeout on the Performance tab in the Application Pool in IIS Manager.

§ Execute reports from cached / snapshot data as opposed to live whenever possible.

§ Limit non-essential background processing to off-peak hours in order to avoid contention with on-line users.

§ If you load your report server up with 4GB memory, remember to set the /3GB switch in C:\boot.ini so application processes can make use of it.

§ If a single server can’t handle the workload, consider locating the Reporting Services catalog on a remote SQL Server instance as your first step toward increasing system capacity.

§ If one report server configured with a remote catalog still doesn’t adequately support your workload, consider increasing the available resources on the system hosting your report server (scale-up) or setting up a clustered web farm of report servers (scale-out).