Introduction

Have you ever felt like pulling your hair out, trying to ascertain exactly which fields in your existing Reporting Services datasets are being utilized by your reports. This happened to me recently during a corporate conversion and cleanup exercise for a database migration to the cloud.

The “aha moment” came after having presented a paper at the PASS SQL Server Nordic Rally (March 2015), when one attendee came up to me and asked if I knew of a method to do this. As they say ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ and spiking my interest, I played around until I came up with the solution that we are going to chat about today. The end solution may be seen below

Introduction

Oft times we are forced into situations where we must clearly think outside of the box. In today’s “get together”, we are going to discuss a challenge that I encountered during the last week of February of this year. The client had been charting weekly business calls placed by his sales reps. Our client had been tracking these results within an Excel spreadsheet (see the screen dump below) and he would be using this spreadsheet to report the sales reps progress going forward. My task was to source this data for the corporate reports in Reporting Services, from this spreadsheet and do so on a weekly basis. The client, being resistant to change, was not willing to change the format of the spreadsheet to something more conducive to be utilized by the chart that he wished to produce (see immediately below).

Introduction

As you will remember from our last “get together” we created an application that permitted us to report upon financial data based upon an unorthodox financial year. In fact, our fiscal year started in July and ended in June. We created a chart to display the data.

In today’s “get together” we are going to push our application a bit further and build in a subreport which will bring up the underlying data when the end user clicks upon the chart for any particular month. Thus should the user click on February 2015, then all of February’s data (for the selected funds) is shown in a matrix. If the user chooses March, then March’s data is shown.

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 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 moreover, look at some good habits to adopt or for the want of better words utilize SQL Server Reporting Services Best Practices.