Paul Turley
Mentor, SolidQ

This article is based on my session at TechEd on May 18th, 2011

Report styles vary depending on the needs of the consumer and purpose of the report. With so many capabilities in current reporting toolsets, report designers are often prone to add graphics, color and… Read more

I’ve seen a  few cases where reports exported or rendered to PDF have distorted charts and images.  We’ve played with fonts and chart properties have sort of accidentally corrected the issue but without really getting to the core problem.  There’ been quite a bit of traffic generated on the MSDN… Read more

…continued from part 1:

Building a Report

For the remainder of this article, I will demonstrate query and report design techniques by progressively building a report, adding steps and features. The examples will focus on the capabilities of the query and results, rather than the visual design of the…

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Start at part 1

…continued from part 2:

Handling Parameters

When an MDX query is created using the graphic query designer, parameters can be added automatically along with the datasets needed to drive the parameter list values. In our case, when writing the query manually, it’s necessary to do… Read more

It’s often true that “a picture is worth a thousands words” but sometimes a picture can be such an effectively communication medium that no more words are necessary.  Such is the case with this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant rating of leading Business Intelligence vendors.  Gartner is the undisputed authority on… Read more

This article is the first in a three-part series

On the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) forum for Reporting Services and other online discussion resources, I see many report developers asking how to building analytical reports using relational data sources. Some of the most fundamental capabilities often require complex and convoluted…

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Every year, Microsoft brings a couple thousand specialists from every corner of the globe together for a few days to Bellevue and the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington.  The Microsoft MVP community represents every discipline and Microsoft product. 

The MVPs are the external advisory committees for each Microsoft product group. … Read more

I see this question on the forums all the time and thought it was worth a repost here.  Just this week, at least two people on the MSDN forum for Reporting Services have asked how to add radio buttons or check boxes to a report. 

Can this be done?
No,… Read more

Last night’s Oregon SQL user group meeting was very enlightening.  Mark Simms form the SQLCAT team came down from Redmond to talk about StreamInsight, a substantial new feature in SQL Server 2008 R2 that allows data to be analyzed and aggregated in-memory as it flows through the server.  I’ve read… Read more

Something recently occurred to me.  I’ve been researching chart and dashboard design standards for an article I’m working on, and the eventual inclusion in an upcoming book.  Funnel charts are commonly used in the sales and customer relationship management (CRM) industry to visualize the volume of leads at various stages… Read more

Last week Donald Farmer announced that he was leaving his long-time position as Microsoft’s lead BI technology evangelist for QlikTech, a small company from Sweden, now based in Pennsylvania; that pioneered in-memory OLAP and analytics.  Microsoft has invested heavily in their own version of in-memory OLAP with PowerPivot and the… Read more

I’ve recently come to realize what a truly remarkable feature it is to be able to format report text using simple HTML tags.  This capability was added to Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008.  Prior to this, all of the text in a textbox could be formatted with a font… Read more

In concept, designing reports is such a simple thing… you connect to a data source, write a SQL query, optimize the query so it runs fast and efficiently, build the report UI and deploy it to the server.  Piece of cake, right?  Not always.  Reporting on simple, normalized data structures… Read more

So I must confess that my blogging efforts to date have been on the impersonal side – perhaps even a bit sterile.  I really admire bloggers who post daily and weekly, and seem to have interesting things to say about common and simple things.  In the coming year, I’d like… Read more

I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays.  To everyone in the SQL Server community, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.  Spend time with your families and no working during the holidays!

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First of all, the title is intended to be a little tongue-in-cheek – just a little bit.  I’ll explain.  Last week while I was teaching a class on report design, one of the students asked “what is the definitive, industry-standard guide for proper dashboard & KPI design?”  I thought, well,… Read more

A consulting client recently asked how they could resolve a capacity-planning issue on their production report server.  They manage a busy report server for a 24/7 international operation.  There are several long-running subscription reports scheduled to run during busy times of the day when other users need to run reports… Read more

I’m interested in hearing your response to this question.  Microsoft is investing aggressively in delivering Business Intelligence as a holistic platform for reporting, collaborating & sharing information.  The next generation of Microsoft self-service reporting tools will require SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition.  Some of the other enterprise BI vendors require heavier… Read more

Project “Crescent” is the name currently used to describe the new self-service reporting capability to be released in the next version of SQL Server.  It’s a fully-interactive, browser-based data visualization surfaced using Silverlight interactive and animated controls.  It’s Reporting Services, only sexier.  We saw several knock-your-socks-off demonstrations of this impressive… Read more

Microsoft is investing heavily in cloud computing with several online services available under the Azure Platform. 

SQL Azure

The SQL Azure cloud database offering has been available for about a year now.  I personally haven’t seen wide adoption for SQL Azure but there’s a lot of interest.  Most of our… Read more