SSRS provides a very user friendly way to author and deploy reports. These reports can be accessed from different platforms where the reports are deployed - reports manager, SharePoint, stand-alone / distributed applications or programmatically using SSRS SOAP endpoints. Unfortunately, SSRS / BIDS does not provide any high-end debugging tools such as SQL Profiler for analyzing the performance of SSRS reports. In this tip we will look at different ways of debugging and analyzing SSRS reports performance using execution logs and freeware tools.  Read more...

I'm trying to decide on a development strategy to satisfy the reporting needs in my organization. I would like to increase our efficiency in responding to report requests, while minimizing our maintenance burden. Two topics that I would like to dig in to are Report Parts and Subreports. Can you provide some considerations for using one versus the other?   Read more...

I rarely use filters in my SSRS reports.  However, this was a client requirement.  When we attempted to use the...  Read more...

This article demonstrates how to use US Census' TIGER/Line shapefile to display CNN-style map in Reporting Services.  Read more...

In this article, MVP Jessica Moss talks about data sources and how to connect them to your report. Learn how to add the reusable data sets and data sources for your reporting projects.  Read more...

With Reporting Services 2008, it is now much easier to produce charts from data in SQL Server, and the variety of charts seems almost limitless. All you need to get started is a quick step-by-step guide that tells you the basics and gets you past the stage of creating the first chart. Well, here it is.  Read more...

I set up a new instance of MS SQL Server Reporting Services, but I noticed that it starts up very slow and I have to wait for ages to access the site. I also noticed that it is always slow when it has not been used for a certain period of time.  Read more...

I'm looking at several new visualization features in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services and the data bar looks like something that I could really use. Can you provide an example of how to use this in a report?  Read more...

I noticed a new feature in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services that allows you to render maps in your reports. Can you provide some details on this new feature and can I take advantage of it even though don't have any spatial columns in my data warehouse?  Read more...

Today’s script took a long time to write. The concepts are fairly simple and the resulting script is quite trivial...  Read more...

This article covers how to implement the SQL Server 2008 Execution Log DB and package on SQL Server 2008 R2  Read more...

Reporting Services provides a robust reporting platform that rivals many other products. New author Adam Aspin stars a series on how you can dress up your reports and maintain good development practices.  Read more...

Here is another one of those strange but true things that I come across every so often which I thought...  Read more...

This Friday Steve Jones talks reporting. Specifically he wonders how long can a report be before it's just wasting space.  Read more...

When using Report Manager, users can export reports to different formats like PDF, XLS and others. When reports are exported to other formats they also include all of the content from the report, but rendered to the format of the report output. There maybe scenarios where you would not want a particular part or component of report to appear in these other report formats. A practical example of this could be that you want to display images when the report is displayed in HTML, but not when the report is exported to a PDF format. In this tip we take a look at a new feature in Reporting Services that allows us to control these items without having to create multiple report versions.  Read more...

I sometimes have ghost memories - I remember some things that had never in fact happened. And I was wondering if ...  Read more...

In this part of our series on Reporting Services (SSRS), Jessica Moss examines the basics of the Report Builder and BIDS.  Read more...

A series from MVP Jessica Moss designed to help you understand Reporting Services and begin building reports.  Read more...

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.   Read more...

Geospatial Visualization is one of the key new features of SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services. This step-by-step tutorial demonstrates the creation of a Map Report.  Read more...