April is turning out to be a busy month for me. Apart from taking the beta SQL Server 2012 certification exams and some reviews, I am also speaking at...

[Read the rest of this article...]

I have always been inspired by a particular quote from Arthur C Clarke - “The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond ...

[Read the rest of this article...]

You just upgraded to SSRS 2008 R2 and some reports are hanging up, while others seem to work fine. How do you debug for this, and what is the fix?

[Read the rest of this article...]

You install or upgrade to SSRS 2008R2 Gold, and get the following error "SSRS SystemOverflowexception: Value was either too large or too small for an Int32". Here is what is going on....

[Read the rest of this article...]

BI Architect Bill Pearson continues an extended examination of parameterization within Analysis Services reports. In this, Part 3 of the article, we continue to get hands-on practice creating a parameter within the graphical user interface, and then examine the construction that Reporting Services 2005/ 2008 / 2008 R2 performs behind the scenes.

[Read the rest of this article...]

BI Architect Bill Pearson continues an extended examination of parameterization within Analysis Services reports. In this, Part 2 of the article, we continue to get hands-on practice creating a parameter within the graphical user interface, and then examine the construction that Reporting Services 2005/ 2008 / 2008 R2 performs behind the scenes.

[Read the rest of this article...]

Effective data presentation techniques help users  interpret information quickly and reliably.  Layout, formatting, sizing, labeling, and other report elements may all be used to facilitate analysis and decision-making.  This article will focus on one aspect of formatting:  color.  More than just an aesthetic concern, color serves a valuable purpose to enhance perception and understanding of data.

[Read the rest of this article...]

Is TOAD faster than BIDS Query Builder? I had a question from the client the other day that confused me at first so I thought it would be good to p...

[Read the rest of this article...]

If you ever see the warning message “This field is missing from the returned result set form the data source” and get unexplained #Errors in columns on your report it may be from SSAS not returning a column is the column is null for all the rows. You can use the IsMissing method of the field object and a vb function in your report to work around this problem.

[Read the rest of this article...]

Setting the format of a text box can be very time consuming... Reporting Services does not have an easy place to go to look up all of the formatting expressions that can be used in the format property. This is simply a list of all of the formatting codes you can use - a useful tool.

[Read the rest of this article...]

You should make a plan around how you are going to organize Data Sources, and what connection types you recommend at the very beginning of your adoption of SSRS. Otherwise, you may find you'll have some rework to do, which might be a pain if you have many reports and report writers to deal with.

[Read the rest of this article...]

In the last tutorial in this series of Reporting Services tutorials we added conditional formatting to the report. Now that we’ve created our first report and have added a bit of flare to it, let’s go ahead and make it even cleaner. In this very quick demonstration, we’ll go ahead and change the visibility of rows or columns based on given conditions.

[Read the rest of this article...]

Trying to get past the Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services learning curve? Well never fret, this article is a first in a series of tutorials to walk you through creating a practical report for your company to monitor your SQL Server’s databases. In this sample report, we’re going to create a job monitoring system. Specifically, we’re going to connect to our SQL Server and report if the jobs succeeded or failed the last time they ran.

[Read the rest of this article...]

Using embedded SQL statements driven by report parameters is a great way to retrieve data for reports within Reporting Services, however stored procedures can be just as fun to work with, easier to implement within a report and more secure.

[Read the rest of this article...]

Now that we see how the Report Viewer Server Control is going to handle most of the work of communicating what we want to see from the RS Server, let’s go ahead and create a web application that will contain our new Server Control.

[Read the rest of this article...]

Reporting Services includes the ReportViewer Server Control as one example that can be installed when you install Reporting Services. It can be reused for most if not all of your report viewing needs to build reports into your applications. In this article, I will discuss ways to implement the ReportViewer Server Control into a Reporting Services web application. I’ll also talk about URL access to reports and why I chose to use that type of access.

[Read the rest of this article...]