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Category: Reporting Services

Two Mobile Reporting Stories On The Microsoft Stack

Published 2017-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley talks about the two competing mobile stories on the Microsoft stack, namely SSRS with DataZen and Power BI:

This is the story of two products – or rather one product that is now a service and another product that is now a component of another product.  A few years ago, Microsoft began to formulate a mobile usability story among many fragmented tools.  They had a really good reporting product: SSRS, and they had a pretty good self-service BI capability offered as a bunch of Excel add-ins; namely: Power Pivot, Power Query and Power View – but it didn’t do mobile.  They bought Datazen which was a decent mobile reporting and dashboard tool, designed primarily for IT developers and semi-tech-savvy business pros to quickly create mobile dashboards using traditional data sources.  Datazen wasn’t really a self-service BI tool and wasn’t really designed to work with BI data in the true sense.  It was a good power user report tool but was young and needed to be refined and matured as a product.  Datazen became “Reporting Services Mobile Reports” and was integrated into the SSRS platform as a separate reporting experience with a separate design tool, optimized exclusively for use on mobile devices using platform-specific mobile phone and tablet apps.  Since initial roll-out, product development stalled and has not changed at all since it was released with SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition.

Paul gives us his current advice, as well as a hint at where things could be going.

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Power BI Report Server August Preview

Published 2017-08-29 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Nelson gives us a happy report:

Power BI Report Server August 2017 Preview is now available. Think of this a “v.Next” of Power BI Report Server [On-Premises], for all Data Sources.

Here’s an excerpt from the Power BI blog post from this weekend:

“With this August 2017 preview, users can create Power BI reports in Power BI Desktop that connect to any data source, and publish their reports to Power BI Report Server. There’s no special configuration required to enable this functionality“

Read on for more information and a link to download the latest preview.  It had me as soon as I read “all data sources.”

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Powershell To Copy Reporting Services Subscriptions

Published 2017-07-28 by Kevin Feasel

Claudio Silva has a new contribution to the Reporting Services Powershell module:

If we take a look to the “New Subscription” form, we will discover about a dozen of fields that need to be configured. Doing this by hand can make you want to pull your hairs, also the probability of error is huge, even with copy & paste.
Who wants to do copy & paste of dozens of fields between reports? I know who doesn’t – me 🙂

Click through to learn more about Claudio’s cmdlets for getting, setting, and removing Reporting Services subscriptions.

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Top Jobs Report

Published 2017-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher only looks at the best SQL Agent jobs:

But sometimes what you want is an overall history. Maybe you want to see your longest running jobs? Or the most frequent jobs? Or jobs that are failing? There is a great pre-built report just for that.

Now, be warned. The report and the history view both pull from the system views and they only hold so much history. You need to make s

With that warning stated, this is a good report if you just want to get some idea of what’s happening on your server.

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Deploying Reporting Services Reports With Powershell

Published 2017-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Claudio Silva has a post covering Reporting Services Powershell cmdlets:

In this post I will share with you the request and how I have automated it saving a lot of time. Just to keep you interested, I went from 23 and a half minutes to 3 (your mileage may vary depending on the number of objects/actions that you need to do).

The request

  1. Create new folder “FolderB”

  2. We need to deploy a copy of the reports and data source to a new folder (“FolderB”). You should get the existing ones from the folder “FolderA” on the same server.

  3. Then you have to change the datasource to point to the database “dbRS” with the login “ReportingUser”

  4. Finally we need to change the data source for each report to match the new datasource pointing to database “dbRS” created on last step.

Click through for the code.  Claudio even has a one-minute video showing his work in action.

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Power BI Report Server Released

Published 2017-06-15 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant notes that Power BI Report Server is now generally available:

The most glaring change from what was announced earlier, is Power BI Report Server can only connect to analysis services data sources, both tabular and multidimensional.  If you want to connect to SQL Server, Oracle or Excel or all three, use the Power BI Web Service.  Only going to the cloud version will users be able to create a data mashup or connect to anything but SQL Server.

Connecting to one data source is not what was promised when the Power BI Report Server was announced in May.  Various Power BI Product members held a session at the Microsoft Data Summit where attendees were able to ask questions.  I asked “When are we going to be able to use Power BI Report Server with data sources other than analysis services?”  In a room full of people, I was assured that it was a top priority of the team to release the same data connectivity functionality for Power BI Report Server that currently exists for Power BI Services and the current plan was to release this functionality the next release.

This is the most glaring flaw with Power BI Report Server at the moment.  Unfortunately, that probably makes it DOA for my purposes, at least until they introduce SQL Server relational as a valid data source.

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Reporting Services Report Schedules

Published 2017-05-31 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Brimhall has a doozy of a query for figuring out SQL Server Reporting Services report schedules:

In pulling the data together from the two sources, I opted to return two result sets. Not just two disparate result sets, but rather two result sets that each pertained to both the agent job information as well as the ReportServer scheduling data. For instance, I took all of the subscriptions in the ReportServer and joined that data to the job system to glean information from there into one result set. And I did the reverse as well. You will see when looking at the query and data. One of the reasons for doing it this way was to make this easier to assimilate into an SSRS style report.

There’s a 680-line script ahead.

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Installing Power BI Report Server

Published 2017-05-24 by Kevin Feasel

Adam Saxton has a video showing how to install and configure Power BI Report Server:

In this video, I look at how to install and configure the May 2017 Preview of Power BI Report Server. Power BI Report Server has a new standalone install experience and this product allows for Power BI reports to be rendered in the web portal along with paginated reports.

This will get you started with the new version.

I was really excited about this preview until I realized that, for now, it only works for Analysis Services data sources.

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Installing Multiple SSRS Instances

Published 2017-05-09 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason explains how to set up multiple SQL Server Reporting Services installations to run against a single SQL Server instance:

Have you ever needed to install multiple instances of SSRS, with each instance “connected” to the same instance of the SQL Server database engine? (By “connected”, I mean that the pair of [ReportServer] databases for each SSRS instance would all reside on the same instance of SQL Server. And each SSRS instance would be reporting on data from one or more databases that also resided on the same instance of SQL Server.)

To my surprise, I don’t see much guidance for this scenario on the internet. TechNet has an article. It’s consistently one of the first search results I get back for variations of “Install multiple instances of SSRS”. That article (and a few others) omit a simple installation step/requirement that was a blind spot for me. (More on that towards the end.) I finally figured out what I was doing wrong and eventually succeeded with my task. Let’s walk through the steps.

I’m not quite positive what problem this best solves, but that could just be a lack of vision on my part.

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Deploying Reports With Powershell

Published 2017-04-27 by Kevin Feasel

Jana Sattainathan has created a few Powershell functions to automate dealing with SQL Server Reporting Services report deployment:

In this post, I want to publish a few functions that I created around SSRS. They are related to and depend on each other.

  • Get-SSRS – Given the SSRS URI returns the WSDL endpoint

  • Get-SSRSReport – Returns one or more reports based on inputs

  • Get-SSRSSharedDataSource – Returns one or more shared data sources based on inputs

  • Get-SSRSReportDataSource – Returns the data source information on a report by report basis based on inputs

  • Set-SSRSReportDataSource – Sets the data source of a report to the given data source.

  • Install-SSRS – Deploys an SSRS report to a specific folder and also optionally sets the datasource for the deployed report

Very useful.

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