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Category: Reporting Services

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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Blank Pages On SSRS Report

Published 2016-10-05 by Kevin Feasel

Vladimir Oselsky fixes an odd (at first) Reporting Services issue with printing of blank pages:

Recently run into an issue that caused me spend more time trying figure out what to do that it did to fix it. I got a very simple ticket. Client reports that extra pages are being printed on SSRS report when it is being sent to a specific printer but other printers are fine, additionally printing to PDF is fine.

After some research, I found multiple articles online that talk about improper page and body setup that results in extra pages. Since I’m not used to working on SSRS report inside BIDS (Bussiness Intelligence Development Studio) which was a precursor to SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools), It took me for longer than I would expect to accomplish a simple task. Therefore I’m hoping the following screenshots will save someone (most likely me) time in fixing this issue.

Click through for screenshots.

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SSRS Express And Azure Limitations

Published 2016-09-27 by Kevin Feasel

William Assaf points out that SQL Server Reporting Services Express Edition cannot connect to Azure SQL Database:

Express editions of SQL Server Reporting Service, from SQL 2016 on down, cannot connect to Azure SQL Databases. Turns out, getting something for free does have some significant limitations.

For example, you’ll see an error message “The Report Server has encountered a configuration error” on a data source page, when creating a new SSRS data source in the Report Manager website. What you may have not noticed on this page was the possible values in the Data Source Type drop down list.

This is an important limitation if you were thinking of living on the free tier of SSRS.

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SSRS Mobile Reports And Data Types

Published 2016-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeek runs into a problem with SSRS Mobile Reports:

The error message “The JSON SharedDataSet Table renderer cannot parse the supplied report” doesn’t exactly tell you what’s going on. Apparently it is having issues with the Location column, which is of the geography data type. If you remove it, the dataset will be imported in the mobile report editor. There’s no documentation of which data types are supported or not in the mobile reports. I included the column in the first place to find out if the Mobile Report Publisher could handle it and plot the data on a map. It seems not.

Example number 798 in the “Microsoft errors tend to tell you what caused the failure, but not what actually caused the failure” ongoing series.  Sure, the JSON SharedDataSet Table renderer blew up…but what does that have to do with me and how do I fix it?  I realize that good error messages can be difficult in complex software, but this one isn’t very helpful at all.

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VMware Configuration Reports

Published 2016-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Allen McGuire has a few Reporting Services reports that he created against vCenter Database:

So you are a DBA and you are in a virtual environment – VMware in particular.  You are curious to know the health of the VMware hosts in terms of CPU and RAM, but you really don’t know how to get the data you need and you’re not certain if the information you are asking for is entirely accurate.  Well, chances are you have access to the VMware databases themselves – if that is the case, you can create these reports based on a blog post from Jonathan Kehayias: “Querying the VMware vCenter Database (VCDB) for Performance and Configuration Information“.

I have created five reports that are based on Jonathan’s queries and you can download the RDL for the SSRS reports below – enjoy!

Click through for the reports.

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Reporting Services Cmdlets

Published 2016-08-01 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley discusses work within the community to get Reporting Services cmdlets:

We (along with Aaron Nelson, Data Platform MVP & Chrissy LeMaire, PowerShell MVP) are working with the SQL Server product teams to recommend the first set of CmdLets that we would like to see added to the PowerShell libraries.  Please help us by posting comments with your suggestions.  What are the most important SSRS-related tasks that you would like to automate using PS?  Give us your top five or so.

I’m glad to see Reporting Services get some Powershell love.

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