One of the greatest rewards of developing any type of report is to transform the vast amounts of business data into useful  information that can support commercial decision-making; producing such  reports as the  performance of an internal process, percentage of an employees’ contribution to overall product sales, or a department’s budget compared to other departments. [...]

Quietly, Microsoft has been making radical improvements to Reporting Services; but precisely what was introduced,  and when?  We asked Bill Pearson, the well-known BI expert,  to come up with a definitive survey of the more recent  changes and how they help the user of Reporting Services. You may not be aware how much Reporting Services [...]

Much of the routine administration of Reporting Services (SSRS), such as the routine deployment of RDL reports, can be automated by using the Reporting Service 2005 class library and web services. To make things easier, Microsoft supply the RS utility to run Visual Basic code as a script. It is an intriguing system, with a [...]

Key Performance Indicators, which vary according to the application, are widely used as a measure of the performance of parts of an organisation.  Analysis Services makes this KPI data easily available to your cube. All you have to do is to follow Rob Sheldon’s simple instructions. In SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), you can add key performance indicators [...]

Quietly, Microsoft has been making radical improvements to Reporting Services; but precisely what was introduced,  and when?  We asked Bill Pearson, the well-known BI expert,  to come up with a definitive survey of the more recent  changes and how they help the user of Reporting Services. You may not be aware how much Reporting Services [...]

Much of the routine administration of Reporting Services (SSRS), such as the routine deployment of RDL reports, can be automated by using the Reporting Service 2005 class library and web services. To make things easier, Microsoft supply the RS utility to run Visual Basic code as a script. It is an intriguing system, with a [...]

To be able to drill into  multidimensional cube data at several levels, you must implement all of the hierarchies on the database dimensions. Then you’ll create the attribute relationships necessary to optimize performance. Analysis Services hierarchies offer plenty of possibilities for displaying the data that your business requires. Rob Sheldon continues his series on SQL Server Analysis [...]

To learn an application, nothing beats getting it up and running. Getting started with Analysis Services can be frustrating unless you have a clear and simple guide that gets you started quickly. In this article, the first in a quick-start series on SSAS, BI and Data Warehousing, Rob Sheldon gets you off the runway, and flying. [...]

Many of us who have to develop a Reporting Services (SSRS) application come across various problems, hurdles or ‘gotchas’  that cause much head-scratching. We’ve never seen, elsewhere, the ten most common SSRS problems ever listed, let alone their solution, but then along came Ryan with both. Help is now at hand for anyone wrestling with Reporting Services. Indispensable reading for [...]