William Assaf and David Nguyen SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 101

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3 MISSION To make a meaningful impact in our clients’ businesses by solving their business challenges through leadership and technology.

What is SSRS? SSRS is really nothing more than a website that hosts web-based reports. It can be made public, or kept internal to your intranet. If you want to show basic tabular reports and graph reports in a web browser, this is your tool of choice. SSRS also has some really cool features behind it, including: scheduling reports to be run and ed out to users as a PDF or excel spreadsheet report caching scaling out to multiple servers for heavy duty workloads 4

How Do I Get SSRS? If you own SQL Server, you own SSRS. SSRS is included in the SQL Server license Standard edition and above, but also including "Express with Advanced Services", however SQL Express in this feature and many is extremely limited. Express edition is not recommended for anything more than limited trial purposes, not production. SSRS isn't sold alone, you buy a SQL Server license and you get the database engine, integration services, reporting services, analysis services, agent, etc. 5

How Do I Install SSRS? SSRS installs from the original SQL Server.iso media you choose Native (standalone) mode or SharePoint integrated mode. Many functions of SSRS development behave the same for either MODE, but they're hosted, administered and secured differently. Keep in mind that one SQL Server license only allows one SSRS install. 6

How Do I Install SSRS? For this presentation we’ll be focusing on the Native mode installation. 7

How Do I Develop Reports in SSRS? You can develop reports in either of two tools: Report Builder (standalone Office-type application) or SQL Server Data Tools – Business Intelligence (SSDT-BI) (a shell of Visual Studio 2010, 2012 or 2013) Both are free downloads. Report Builder is more for the business power-user. SSDT-BI is where developers will work because it can integrate with source control, deployments, etc. Developers will prefer working in SSDT-BI. 8

How Do I Develop Reports in SSRS? You can keep up to date with the latest SSDT-BI to deploy reports to older versions of SSRS servers, back to SQL From project properties: Improvements have been made at each step, so it is recommended to keep up to date with SSDT-BI. Keep in mind that the entire team should use the same version of SSDT-BI to develop the same reports. 9

SSRS Can Query Many Data Sources 10

AdventureWorks We’re going to launch a live demo of SSRS Development using SQL Server Data Tools – BI and using the sample AdventureWorks database as our data source. Need sample data for your own learning? AdventureWorks is Microsoft’s regularly-updated sample database, a free download here:

Real Simple Things in SSRS 1.Start with a wizard and a query. 2.Design/Preview tabs, and folders for shared DataSources and DataSets. 3.Point out ReportData tab. 4.How to display a date and convert a date in the SSRS expression language 5.Concatenate two values together 6.Map a parameter through to the dataset query 7.Deploy the report 12

Top 10 Tips to Know About SSRS 1.Don't do page 1 of x ([&OverallTotalPages]) 13

Top 10 Tips to Know About SSRS 2.Never do SELECT * FROM [table] Make SQL Server do the work. Filter in your queries with parameters as much as possible. Query on the data (rows AND columns) that you will actually use. Use parameters with default values that are fast-performing, so have start/end dates default to this week, not this year. Have a multiselect drop down default to none or one, not all. (Example: branches) 14

Top 10 Tips to Know About SSRS 3.Use the ExecutionLogn views to analyze performance Data Retrieval Processing Rendering Get report duration data per report, per parameter set, per presentation format, etc.! The ExecutionLog has been incremented in major releases, adding data to the view each time: SQL Server 2005 – ExecutionLog SQL Server 2008 – ExecutionLog2 SQL Server 2008 R2 – ExecutionLog3 15

Top 10 Tips to Know About SSRS 4.Don’t write queries against your live production data, if you can help it. Your read-only reports could have a negative performance impact on your read-write queries. Lots of other options here: Stage data on another database (even on the same server). Create a copy of the data and keep it up to date using: Change Tracking and/or SSIS Transactional Replication (live) Database Snapshots (nightly) AlwaysOn Availability Groups (Enterprise edition, live) 16

Top 10 Tips to Know About SSRS 5.Don’t include extraneous datasets, they will get run even if you don't use them! 17

Top 10 Tips to Know About SSRS 6.Always include a timestamp for the report of when it was run in the header. If possible, also include a timestamp for when the underlying data was last updated, for example, if your data warehouse process runs nightly, record the time it successfully finishes, or when the cube successfully populates, and include that on reports. That way, end-users will immediately know if a problem occurred with the overnight data warehouse process. 18

Top 10 Tips to Know About SSRS 7.Use drilldowns to provide detail, but set drilldown groups to be collapsed by default, not fully expanded by default. Use subtotal and grand total rows to provide immediate value, let users drill into the detail row data as they see necessary. 19

Top 10 Tips to Know About SSRS 8.Don’t do too much. Lots of clients will ask for a single giant report with massive amounts of data. They may want some sort of dashboard, but when possible, avoid subreports and break out reports into individual instances. Considering building a dashboard as a single new report, independent of subreports. 20

Top 10 Tips to Know About SSRS 9.Copy report Parameters into the header of the report, so that it is obvious that the data is filtered. List out parameter selections, date filters, etc., in the header of the report. In our demo example, adding “Displaying transactions after [startdate]” would be appropriate in the header. 21

Top 10 Tips to Know About SSRS 10.Rapid, frequent prototypes The most efficient way to develop reports for users is to show them the report in development early on and regularly. No surprises. You will find more bugs and bugs earlier with many early demo’s to the target audience. In these meetings, work with the client to focus on data presentation and data quality, not cosmetic issues. (This is difficult!) 22

Questions? 23

Bios and Contacts This presentation, including all source code and this slide deck, has been posted at William’s blog & David if he gets one: SQLTact.com William D Assaf, MCSE – Principal Consultant – – David H Nguyen, MCP – Associate Application Development Consultant – – Twitter: not yet