About the Series …
This
article is a member of the series MSSQL Server Reporting Services. The series is designed to
introduce MSSQL Server Reporting Services ("Reporting Services"),
with the objective of presenting an overview of its features, together with
many tips and techniques for real-world use. For more information on the
series, as well as the hardware / software requirements to prepare for the
exercises we will undertake, please see my initial Database Journal article, A New
Paradigm for Enterprise Reporting.
As I
have stated since the charter article of the series, published about the time
Reporting Services was first publicly released, my conviction is that Reporting
Services will commoditize business intelligence, particularly in its role as a
component in an integrated Microsoft BI solution. Having been impressed from
my first exposure to this exciting application, when it was in early beta, my
certainty in its destiny grows stronger by the day, as I convert formerly
dominant enterprise Business Intelligence systems, such as Cognos, Business
Objects, Crystal, and others, to the Reporting Services architecture. I receive
constant requests to conduct strategy sessions about these conversions with
large organizations in a diverse range of industries – the interest grows daily
as awareness of the solution becomes pervasive. Indeed, the six-plus figures
that many can shave from their annual IT budgets represent a compelling
sweetener to examining this incredible toolset.
Basic
assumptions underlying the series are that you have correctly installed
Reporting Services, including current service packs, along with the
applications upon which Reporting Services relies, and that you have access and
the other rights / privileges required to complete the steps we undertake in my
articles. For details on the specifics of the adjustments necessary to quickly
allow full freedom to complete the exercises in this and subsequent articles,
as well as important assumptions regarding rights and privileges in general,
please see earlier articles in the series, as well as the Reporting Services Books
Online.
About the Mastering OLAP Reporting Articles…
As I
have noted in many articles and presentations, one of the first things that
becomes clear to "early adopters" of Reporting Services is that the "knowledgebase"
for OLAP reporting with this tool is, to say the least, sparse. (I
recently heard an internal "reporting guru" say, during a BI strategy
session with a major soft drink manufacturer in Atlanta, that "we didn’t evaluate Reporting Services because it
doesn’t do cubes …") As most of us are aware, minimal, if any, attention
is given to using Analysis Services cubes as data sources for reports in the
handful of books that have been published on Reporting Services to date. All are
written from the perspective of relational reporting, as if with existing
popular tools for that purpose. One Reporting Services book discusses OLAP
reporting with Reporting Services, and then performs illustrative exercises
with Office Web Components (OWC), instead. Another depicts an MDX snippet at
the end of the book, as if as an afterthought. All of the early books focus
entirely on relational reporting, and most make heavy use, typically enough, of
the Books Online and other scraps of documentation that we already have
anyway. (I could go on, but my overall opinion of the technical book industry
is already well known.)
As I
stated in my article, Mastering
OLAP Reporting: Cascading Prompts,
the purpose of the Mastering OLAP Reporting subset
of my Reporting Services series is
to focus on techniques for using Reporting Services for OLAP reporting. In many cases, which I try to
outline in my articles at appropriate junctures, the functionality of the
reporting solutions of well-established, but expensive, solutions, such as
Cognos PowerPlay, can be met in most respects by Reporting Services – at a tiny
fraction of the cost. The vacuum of documentation in this arena, to date,
represents a serious "undersell" of Reporting Services from an OLAP
reporting perspective. I hope to contribute to making this arena more
accessible to everyone, and to share my implementation and conversion experiences
as the series evolves. In the meantime, rest assured that the OLAP potential
in Reporting Services will be yet another reason that the application "commoditizes"
Business Intelligence.
For
more information about the Mastering OLAP Reporting articles, see the section entitled "About the Mastering OLAP Reporting
Articles" in my article Ad Hoc
TopCount and BottomCount Parameters.
