Reporting Services 2008 brings many enhancements for data visualization. The queen is Gauge, which is ideal tool to create scorecard and KPI. Imagine the report popping up in front of manager with colourful and fancy indicators like this:
Gauge is only one among many other things. Charting is more fun than ever, with many 3D effects and customizable areas. I also like new feature such as calculated series that deliver moving average report in minutes. No more complex expression to calculate median or moving data.
Gauge also comes with many type such as radial type with speedometer style. I can display sales indicator and turn the pointer to red, yellow, or green like this:
I did demo and discussion about this topic in Singapore SQL UG meeting on June 25, 2009. As I promised to upload my slide deck, you can grab it here:
Of course I release the source code too for deeper exploration. Apologize that I don’t have enough passion to tidy up the reports for best appearance. The source code is available in my skydrive:
All reports need AdventureWorks2008 and AdventureWorks2008DW database sample that can be obtained from CodePlex.
Below are some pictures from the meeting:
posted on: June 26th, 2009 |
I blogged about backup compression here, and I mentioned that the main advantages are saving space, reduced backup and restore time. After discussion with some fellow MVPs, I have to revise my statement in previous post.
Yes, backup compression saves backup and restore time only if there are enough CPU and IO resources available. This is obvious because IO is the biggest bottleneck when reading/writing backup file. Thanks to Aaron and Andrew for remind me about this fact.
However, IO bottleneck is solvable if we use fast removable storage (eSATA for example) instead of internal hard disk. With this way, we can take full advantage of compression without affecting current machine performance.
The SQL Customer Advisory team did a very comprehensive benchmark on this. Below is some screen shoot I cut and paste from their blog post:
The complete post for benchmark by SQLCAT is here
http://sqlcat.com/technicalnotes/archive/2008/04/21/tuning-the-performance-of-backup-compression-in-sql-server-2008.aspx
posted on: June 11th, 2009 |
Well, traditional reporting is quite common. It connects to relational database, perform calculation and agregation, then display it in a nice and neat report. What is data mining reporting anyway?
It is also a report, but connects to mining model rather than traditional RDBMS. Example: a model to forecast the customer behavior created in SSAS. It predicts whether a customer will favor buy or not buy toward our product. Then we have another dataset of our potensial customers. We want to predict their behavior, will they favor BUY over not buying?
We can use SQL Reporting Services, connect to decision trees mining model inside SSAS, and use potensial customers data as input. The result is predicted behaviour and probability whether Mr.Bob will BUY (90%) and Mr. John not buy (60%). Another cool tool is Excel Data Mining Add-In. It uses Excel 2007 as data mining client tool, very nice and intuitive for end user. There is a very nice overview how does it work, read it here.
I also presented this tool, together with SSRS data mining reporting at Singapore CTU on May 23, 2009. The crowd were very enthusiast about this guy. Nice tool very end user power user, event for IT Pro.
My PPT can be downloaded here:
posted on: June 2nd, 2009 |
I was forced to install SQL Server 2005 X64 in my system, because my development DB was X64. Since my machine runs Win 7 X64, I was tempted to install on top of it. Anyway, I don’t have a spare machine, and VPC also does not support X64 OS 
.
I was thinking that everything should be fine because I did it on my Vista X64 before. But apparently not, after tweak the setting here and there, I was ended up with the following error screen:
I was sure that all pre-requisites has been installed properly, but it was still failed. My first attempt was checking IIS 7 configuration, but everything was fine. The machine passed IIS requirement checking at the beginning of the steps.
I tried the last resort, just checking my luck. Since I saw that SQL Native Client was failed to install, I tried to download the latest SQLNCLI and voila! It was installed successfully after I updated the native client. Moral of the story: Windows 7 X64 RC does not come with the latest SQLNCLI, and the one bundled in SQL 2005 CD is not compatible with Mr. 7.
To sum up, this is the steps to install SQL 05 X64 on Win 7 x64 RC:
Download and install the latest SQL Native client, it’s bundled under SQL 2005 Feature Pack family. I use the one from February 2007 and worked like a magic.
Second, make sure all pre-requisites are installed such as IIS 7 components (ASP.NET, CGI, IIS6 compatibility, etc). This is the case if we want to configure Reporting Services as well.
Once installation finished, update to SQL Server 2005 SP2. Without update, it won’t work because the security policy kicked out Mr. Administrator from SQL sysadmin role .
That’s all, happy testing …
posted on: June 1st, 2009 |
I did presentation for MaxIT event on May 29, 2009 and one of the interesting discussion was SharePoint integration with Reporting Services. I know that SharePoint is hot here in Singapore. I also did demo on some new features of SSRS 2008 such as tablix and charting. My presentation slide can be downloaded here:
There are several advantages of integrating SSRS with SharePoint:
- Seamless UI for end user. They do not need to jump from one screen to another to open report and SharePoint dashboard at the same time.
- All reports are deployed as document library, so it follows all SharePoint library setting. It saves lots of time instead of managing report in separate report manager.
- All reports are under SharePoint security setting, giving better consolidated administrative from SharePoint perspective
- Render reports inside web part. It makes building SharePoint dashboard faster and easier.
What do we need to configure this:
- SharePoint Services 3.0 or MOSS 2007, It’s better if upgraded to SP1 or SP2.
- SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services with SP2, or Reporting Services 2008.
- Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint. There are 2 versions of add-in: SSRS 2005 and SSRS 2008.
Configuration can be simple (all in one box) or scale up to separate boxes. Below is the logical architecture if SSRS and SharePoint are installed on separate boxes:
Assuming that SharePoint already installed, below are the explanations to do integration.
Continue Reading: Sharepoint – Reporting Services Integration
posted on: May 30th, 2009 |
This is a quick post of my presentation slide and demo codes for Singapore SQL Server User Group last week. I presented the following topics:
- What is data warehouse
- Data warehouse design
- How to load dimension and fact table
- Performance trade of
- Best practices in DW design and ETL
- Demos on SSIS
Grab my PPT and demo from my skydrive here:
posted on: March 1st, 2009 |
Backing up database is a routine DBA job. This easy task become a headache when the machine runs out of disk space. We need to cleanup the disk or attach a new one to do the backup. Fortunately, SQL Server 2008 comes with built in compression feature of backup set. We can do backup and compress at the same time. What does it mean?
- Save disk space, the compressed size is only around 10% of normal backup.
- Faster backup time.
- Faster restore time (surprise)!.
This is very convenience approach instead of doing normal backup and compress it with Winzip. According to benchmark I did, Winzip compression works slower than backup with compress on the fly. Not mention that we also have to unzip the file to restore from backup.
I am also surprise because restoring compressed backup is faster than non compressed. Logically, it needs to decompress and restore so it should be slower than restoring normal one. But my benchmark showed the opposite. I modified the AdventureWorks2008 sample database and insert additional data to make it bigger.
Below is my benchmark results with 900 MB size.
- Backup with no compress: 115 seconds
- Backup with compress: 49 seconds
- Restore from non compressed backup : 123 seconds
- Restore from compressed backup : 113 seconds
So, are you convinced? Here are the scripts to do compressed backup.
Continue Reading: New in SQL Server 2008: Backup Compression
posted on: February 6th, 2009 |
I know that running SharePoint on Vista or Windows 7 is not for production, but as a developer I need a handy tool for coding and testing instead of VPC or VMWare. Well, installing SharePoint on Windows 7 is not officially supported, but if you are a geek enthusiast, here are the steps:
First, prepare IIS 7 for ASP.NET component. I configured the following components in my Win 7:
Continue Reading: Running SharePoint on Windows 7
posted on: January 28th, 2009 |
I had a bad experience with transaction log file, it was 8 years ago. But thanks to Mr.Bad, I learnt very important lesson as newbie DBA at that time. This is the story: my ERP application which sitting on top of SQL Server 2000 was fine at Friday afternoon. I went home for a weekend, only to find everybody was starred at me at Monday morning. What had happened? The ERP was crashed, actually it couldn’t start at all.
I went to my SQL Server box, and the guy was stopped. It’s not started. I checked everything from security permission to possibility of virus, nil. Then I found that the disk was out of space because of transaction log explosion. The accounting guy was doing quarterly stock journal in the system, and it caused transaction log growth exponentially. There was an audit table which recording all journal operation, and obviously the INSERT operation was the source of problem.
Moral of the story: make sure you have automated way to manage transaction log growth.
There are 2 way to shrink the log:
- Detach database, delete the big log, and re-attach without log file. SQL Server will create a new, fresh log file with minimum initial size. It is 2MB by default. Disadvantage: the database will not be available during the process. Offline duration depends on how fast is the detach – attach operation takes time.
- Better approach: use SHRINKFILE of DBCC command. This is better because I do not need to bring the system OFF.
Regardless of the approach, make sure to do full database backup. Shrinking the log deletes historical transaction that may be needed to restore database to specific point of time. Just in case, make sure to do full backup. You have been warned right .
These are the steps to shrink a huge log file:
Continue Reading: Shrink and manage huge SQL log file
posted on: January 3rd, 2009 |
This is a quick post for my presentation slide and demos at SharePoint Pro Singapore User Group Meeting last week. I discussed about configuration on SharePoint box to make it Silverlight enabled, and also giving some demos to write Silverlight video player then deploy it to SharePoint.
The PPT and demos are available for download from my Skydrive. Enjoy!
posted on: December 15th, 2008 |
