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Category: Reporting Services

SSRS Data Preview

Published 2016-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Kathi Kellenberger points out a potential risk with the new Data Preview functionality in SQL Server Reporting Services 2016:

One of the features that took me by surprise is the ability to view data directly from a shared dataset. This feature is called Data Preview, and is available to anyone who has permission to view the dataset and the security at the data source works out. I’m not sure how often shared datasets have been used in previous versions of SSRS. They were not actually needed in many cases, and I generally recommended them for datasets that would be frequently reused such as common parameter lists. This advice will have to change with 2016, because shared datasets are required for the new KPI reports and Mobile Reports.  Stored credentials will be used in the data sources in many cases, because Kerberos delegation is not supported yet with Mobile Reports.

This is a potential data leakage scenario, so if you have potentially sensitive data sets, you’ll want to read this post.

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Power BI On-Prem In 2017

Published 2016-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley points out a blog post from the Reporting Services team:

When will we have this next Technical Preview?

We’re targeting January 2017 to release this next Technical Preview.

What’s the release vehicle for a production-ready version?

We plan to release the production-ready version in the next SQL Server release wave. We won’t be releasing it in a Service Pack, Cumulative Update, or other form of update for SSRS 2016.

When will we have a production-ready version?

We’re targeting availability in mid-2017.

That makes it sound like they’re pushing it to coincide with the vNext release.

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Parameterized Visibility In SSRS Reports

Published 2016-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Monica Rathbun shows how to show or hide clusters of columns in Reporting Services reports:

Ever had users come to you and request another version of a report just to add another field and group data differently? Today, was such the day for me. I really don’t like have multiple versions of the same report out there. So, I got a little fancy with the current version of the report and added a parameter then used expressions to group the data differently and hide columns. For those new to SSRS I’ve embedded some links to MSDN to help you along the way.

This is an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide.

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Displaying SSRS Indicators Horizontally

Published 2016-11-29 by Kevin Feasel

Derik Hammer shows how to display a set of indicators horizontally instead of vertically in a Reporting Services report:

If you are looking for a tabular report you can stop here. This does not look very nice on a dashboard, however. Now I will show you how to convert this into a grouping of colorful indicators.

Remove the [Rating] field from the bottom row and create an indicator by right-clicking on the placeholder and selecting Insert > Indicator. Then select the type you would like.

There are several steps, but Derik lays it all out nicely with screenshots.

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SSRS + Power BI Desktop

Published 2016-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Peterson walks through the steps to check out the SSRS 2016 preview which supports Power BI Desktop:

SSRS 2016 supporting Power BI Desktop reports is now in preview on Azure. But for many of us, we’d rather be able to review this in our own virtual environment, and more specifically – VirtualBox. We’ll now you can.

Our starting point was a blog posting my Microsoft employee Christopher Finlan outlining the steps needed to setup this preview in a Hyper-V environment. A great start, but what we wanted was the ability to run it Virtual Box. Fortunately for us, running the downloaded VHD in VirtualBox is much easier than Hyper-V.

Click through for the instructions.

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Powershell Cmdlets For SSRS

Published 2016-11-10 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Nelson reports that there are now Powershell cmdlets for SQL Server Reporting Services:

I have been testing these commands for several weeks and so far my favorite command is Write-RsFolderContent because it will allows you to write the .RDL & .RSD files from a directory on your machine to your SSRS folder. Like the whole thing. You don’t have to throw it into a loop or anything. Try it out!

This is a wonderful replacement for the old RSScripter app (of which I still have a copy squirreled away somewhere).

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On-Prem Power BI

Published 2016-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck looks at the preview of Power BI integration inside Reporting Services:

  • one thing that I am missing, is when you are rendering the report that there is an “edit report” button that takes you to Power BI Desktop. A bit like in PowerBI.com, where you can also go to edit mode if you have the correct permissions.

  • by the way, if you truly want to test it locally, you can download the .vhd file (the virtual hard disk) and run it in your own HyperV environment.

All in all it looks very nice for a first preview. Currently only SSAS is supported and custom visualizations are not, but I guess the SSRS team will surprise us with more features soon. Great job SSRS team!

Lots of interesting thoughts here, so check it out.

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SSIS And SSRS Practices

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Seferlis has a list of practices which he’s learned over the years:

Use Source Control

  1. For anyone who was a developer in their past life, or is one now, this is a no-brainer, no-alternative best practice.  In my case, because I come from a management and systems background, I’ve had to learn this the hardway.  If this is your first foray into development, get ready, because you’re in for some mistakes, and you’re going to delete or change some code you really wish you didn’t.  Whether it be for reference purposes on something you want to change, or something you do by accident, you’re going to need that code you just got rid of yesterday, and we both know you didn’t back up your Visual Studio jobs… Hence, source control.  Github and Microsoftoffer great solutions for Visual Studio, and Redgate offers a great solution for SSMS.  I highly recommend checking them out and using the tools!  There are some other options out there that are free, or will save your code to local storage locations, but the cloud is there for a reason, and many of us are on the go, so having it available from all locations is very helpful.

Regarding source control for Integration Services packages, that’s a good reason to learn Biml—it works much better for source control than the native packages (which change every time you open the package and contain a lot of noise).

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Power BI Integrates With SSRS

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley discusses a brand new announcement:

What am I most excited about as I prepare for the PASS Summit here in Seattle this week?  A lot of things.  Preparing for my session, which will be on Thursday at 1:30, by far the most popular and interesting topics are about integration and tool choice.  Today’s public announcement on the SSRS product team blog about on-premises Power BI integration with Reporting Services is really big news.  It’s great to see two of the technologies I love working together.  Whether in the cloud or on-premises, Power BI and Reporting Services can be used together.

It’s hard to overstate how huge this is.  Plenty of companies want the reporting that Power BI offers, but have security or software policies in place which prevented Power BI adoption.  Having it render through Reporting Services means that end users don’t need to have Power BI Desktop and that the data and reports remain entirely on-prem.

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R Services Resource Utilization

Published 2016-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant shows off some R Services reports to see how hard the developers are battering your poor servers with their R scripts:

R Services – Extended Events is also not a report but a list of all the extended events that are available for R Services. This is a handy bit of information, which can be a great reference tool for extended events monitoring. R Services – Packages lists the packages which are currently installed on SQL Server. When people write R, many lot of different packages are used within the script. Prior to running a package, check the information on this report to ensure the libraries used are installed on SQL Server. If the library is missing the code will not work. R Services – Resource Usage is a great way to see how R has been configured to run on the server. Notice I have created an External Pool for R. This is a configuration recommended by Microsoft to better monitor your R Services.

Click through for more information, and grab the reports from Microsoft’s Github repo.

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