1. Administrivia HW #1 management option due now – please submit
HW #1 ETL option due next Tuesday (4/8)
HW #2 reporting option now available on wiki
OLAP option will be posted this weekend

2. BI Tools and Techniques Robert Monroe April 3, 2008
Reporting Tools
BI Tools and Techniques
Robert Monroe
April 3, 2008

3. Goals
Understand what reporting tools can do and how they can help businesses get the right information to the right people at the right time
Understand some of the different ways that reporting tools are used, and how different tools address different challenges and different parts of the reporting market
Practice building some simple reports with Reporting Services

4. Questions What is a report? What are reporting tools?
In the context of general business?
In the context of Information Systems?
A presentation of data or analysis results from an information system (Bob Monroe)
What are reporting tools?
Software tools and toolsets designed that assist people in extracting data from information systems, operational databases, and data warehouses, turning it into useful information, and presenting it effectively to the end-user. (Bob Monroe)
How do reporting tools differ from any other application that accesses a database?

5. Reports Are Primarily Used For Three Purposes
Making decisions
… but what kinds of decisions?
Tracking status of business processes
Examples?
Identifying exceptions/problems

6. Report Example – Sales By Category
Page from a sales report listing product sales for a specific category (dairy)
Same information displayed in tabular form and as a chart
How might this report be used for:
Making decisions?
Tracking status?
Identifying exceptions?

7. Report Example AdventureWorks Top 5 salespeople and Top 5 stores
Multiple formats for presenting data
How might this report be used for:
Making decisions?
Tracking status?
Identifying exceptions?

8. Report Example – Sales Order Detail
AdventureWorks sales order detail report
Presentation of a single record with minimal aggregation or processing
How might this report be used for:
Making decisions?
Tracking status?
Identifying exceptions?

9. Report Example – Sales Cube
AdventureWorks sales summary matrix
Supports drill-down and aggregation in ‘live’ report
Driven by OLAP cube database
How might this report be used for:
Making decisions?
Tracking status?
Identifying exceptions?

10. Report Example – CIO Dashboard
Dashboard summary of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for a CIO
Presents a wide variety of data in summary format
How might this report be used for:
Making decisions?
Tracking status?
Identifying exceptions?
Source,

11. Report Example – Financial Analysis
Dashboard summary of financial situation
Presents a wide variety of financial data in summary format
How might this report be used for:
Making decisions?
Tracking status?
Identifying exceptions?
Source,

12. Why Use Reporting Tools?
How hard can it be to write some SQL queries?
Programmers are scarce, expensive, bottlenecks
Converting raw data (e.g. SQL query) into presentation of useful, actionable information is nontrivial
Wide variety of end-users
Security and access control
Support global organizations

13. Common Reporting Tool Capabilities
Support for information retrieval by non-programmers
Query-by-example
WYSYWIG-type query generation
Paramaterized retrieval of data from databases
Support for attractive rendering and presentation of retrieved data
Generally user-configurable presentation
Often a set of pre-canned presentation formats
Tables, matrices, charts, graphs, pivot tables, etc.

14. Common Reporting Tool Capabilities (Cont.)
Presentation/export of reports in many different formats
Report push and pull to a variety of endpoints
Security and access control
Support for integration with other applications
Custom-developed applications
3rd party applications (e.g. SAP, POS systems, etc.)

15. Major Reporting Tool Vendors
Business Objects (SAP)
Cognos (IBM)
Microsoft
Oracle
SAP
MicroStrategy
Many, many smaller players

16. Reporting Tool Evaluation Criteria
Non-IT Professionals Analysts IT Professionals
Target users:
Ad-hoc Parameterizable Predefined
Exploration:
General Purpose Domain-Specific Single Purpose
Specificity:
Embedded Web/client-based Mobile
Delivery:
Text Programming XML/4GL WYSYWIG
Specification:

17. Implementing Reporting Systems

18. Some Implementation Guidelines
Rule #1: Understand needs and requirements before undertaking a reporting systems project
Start by figuring out where you want to end, work backwards
Some initial questions to ask:
Who will use the reporting system? How IT-savvy are they?
What information will the end-users need?
Do they need pre-canned, configurable, and/or ad hoc reports?
How/when should end-users receive the reports?
Is the required data available? Does it need to be massaged?
Which of our applications need to integrate with new reporting system?
Now? In the future?

19. Factors In Creating Effective Reports
Presentation
Delivery
Timeliness
Correctness

20. Selecting Data Sources
Reporting tools frequently pull from many data sources
Data warehouses
Data marts
Transactional data stores
OLAP cubes
Etc.
Data Mining
Tools Q u e r i e s
Queries
ETL
Queries
Queries
Reporting
And Vis Tools E T L
Data E T L
Warehouse
Queries
ETL E
OLAP T L
Cube Q
OLAP
GUI u e r i
Operational e s
Databases
Data Marts

21. Security And Access Control
Rule #1 of information security – it’s a management issue first and foremost
A reporting system can make much more information available to many more people
Is this always a good thing?
Careful analysis needed:
Who should be able to see what, when, and under what conditions
Establishing roles, permissions, and policies helps keep it managable
A good reporting system should help manage access to information
Access policies, granularity of access control

22. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

23. SQL Server 2005 Overview
SQL Server 2005 consists of a collection of integrated modules that address different database and BI needs
Today’s focus: Reporting Services
Source: Microsoft’s SQL Server Books Online

24. Reporting Services Features
Report specification
Report presentation
Report storage, updating, archiving
Report distribution
Export to multiple formats
Integration/embedding with external applications
Report Models

25. Two Primary Client Tools
Management Studio
Database administration
Ad hoc queries/sql
BI Development Studio
Report development and testing
Report model development
OLAP development and testing …

26. Reporting Services Architecture
Diagram Source: Microsoft’s SQL Server Books Online

27. Key Reporting Services Concepts
Report Definition Language (RDL) file
Report Designer component
Data Sources and Connections (for reports)
DataSet
pointer to a data source + query used to retrieve data
Publishing a report
Report Manager
End-user tool for viewing/managing reports over the web

28. In-Class Exercise #1 Form groups of 2-3 students
You are the Chief _______ Officer of AdventureWorks
Identify three important reports that you would like to use to do your job more effectively.
For each report:
Briefly name and describe the report
What decisions will you use this report to make?
What information should the report contain (be specific)?
How frequently should the report be run or updated?
How would you like it delivered to you?
Will you want to be able to explore report details? What does this imply?
Should access to the report be limited? To whom?

29. In-Class Exercise #2
Select one of the reports identified in exercise #1
For this report:
Determine whether the information you need is readily available in the AdventureWorks database
If so, where is it and how would you retrieve it?
If not, what might you do to get the information you need?
Sketch a proposed presentation for the report

30. In-Class Exercise #3 - AdventureWorks Report Samples
Open BI Development Studio (BIDS)
Open sample AdventureWorks reports
Installed by default at:
File > Open > Open Project Solution
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Samples\Reporting Services\Report Samples\AdventureWorks Sample Reports
If not installed, can be downloaded from course wiki:
Find Report Samples\AdventureWorks Sample Reports.sln
Open solution
Explore how the reports are implemented