Introduction

I recently heard from a lady from overseas who wanted to find a quick and dirty mechanism of extracting data for a given date range (based upon a fiscal year that started July 1^st and ended June 30^th). The idea interested me and as always, I had to try it out.

In today’s “get together”, we are going to have a look at how this may be achieved.

Introduction

In our last two chats, we discussed enterprises that have had financial years that began in July and ended at the end of June. One of our clients works with this fiscal calendar and their financial folks are Excel “Fundi’s” (Fundisa is an Nguni word for “expert”). Many of their reports contain the current month’s sales in addition carrying running totals from the beginning of the fiscal year to date. Read more »

Introduction

Oft times we are forced into situations where we clearly need to think outside of the box. A case at hand arose early in 2014 where one of our client’s required a “quick and dirty” front end to modify data within a table that reflected the outstanding balances (of their clients) and the attempts that they had made to recover these funds. Master Data Services seemed to be the way to go!

Introduction

In our last get together I mentioned that oft times SQL Server reports are created due to a dire business need, used once and never again. Further, some reports that we believe are not often used could be “top of the pops” unbeknown to us. A guess as to the amount of times a report is used per month, in addition to the statistics behind each report should not be guess work, but rather monitored actively to ensure that frequently used reports are both efficient and effective. Further, those reports that are either not used or have not been run in quite some time, should perhaps be removed in order to keep the server clean and not cluttered.

Introduction

A few months back, I presented a paper at SQL Saturday 327 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Late last month I received an email from one of the attendees. His issue was quite interesting and I decided to share it with you. The gentleman wanted a SSIS script that would permit him to extract data from a SQL Server database table and place it in a CSV file with a dynamically allocated name. Being a strong advocate of using the SSIS toolbox, I experimented with an alternative solution. We are going to construct THIS SOLUTION in today’s get together.

Let’s get started.

Introduction

In past chats, we have had a look at a myriad of different business intelligence techniques that one can utilize to turn data into information. In today’s “get together” we are going to try to pull all these techniques together, rationalize our development plans and more over look at some good habits to adopt or for the want of better words utilize SQL Server Reporting Services Best Practices.