I want to use SSRS to make an Epicor report that is the same as Job Management/Reports/Downtime Detail Report and General Ledger/Reports/General Ledger. Is there a place I can go to see SQL examples? Crystal uses BAQ and I don't need to learn that.
I opened the crystal reports and I looked through the database tables. Someone must have already done this so I am hoping to see examples. I found some on GitHub but they are not for the reports I am needing to develop.
Related
We are using the IBM Cognos Report Studio for Making the Reports.
And we have 1000s of reports developed and using.
Now i need to fetch all the SQL queries written in these 1000+ reports.
For that at present i am opening the report studio for each individual report and getting the query.
But it is very tedious job and taking months to get all the SQLs in these 1000+ reports.
So i am looking for a way to get all these queries from database behind Cognos studio.
Does these report parameters (including the SQL) store in a Database or only in Contentstore?
If it store in DB then is it possible to access the Report Studio in a Database tool like Oracle SQL Developer?
So that i can fetch all the SQLs in one shot from the database table.
Thanks for the help!
My experience migrating from one reporting product to another is like what you are asking. I think I had 7000 reports that I was aware of plus many reports sitting on workstation hard drives. At some point along the way we realized that the new product had different features than the old one, so report redesign was a good option in most cases. It took 18 months once we actually started working on the reports. That was to replace the 700 "standard" reports. Users were on their own (with support from IT and subject matter experts) for their custom work. I now have about 19,000 reports in Cognos.
Except where the report developer wrote SQL in a SQL object in the Queries area, Cognos reports do not contain SQL code. Cognos generates the SQL at runtime based on the report spec and user interaction (what parameters they set, what page the opened, etc.). Short of writing your own report spec parser, duplicating the work that Cognos does for you, there is no way I know of to generate the SQL.
One possibility: I haven't dug too deeply into the Cognos SDK. There may be a method there to generate the SQL for each report. Then you can do it automatically. Be aware that for thousands of reports you'll want to run this process during non-work hours. It could run for hours and may use a lot of resources.
Another possibility: Turn on native query logging (Cognos Administration | System | All dispatchers | | Set properties | Settings | Logging | Check the boxes for "Audit the native query..."). Then have a person, a product like those from Motio, or a Cognos SDK program you create yourself run every report. Then you can get the SQL from the Audit database. Of course, the problem here is answering prompts. It will probably take a person to run these.
To add two columns to a list, or two data elements to a report or page header or footer, or two filters (I don't know what you mean by "clause"), you'll want to use the Cognos SDK.
Choose relevant examples of different types of reports.
Examine the XML report spec for each of those reports.
Determine how to identify where the new element should appear in the XML.
Write a program (probably in C# or Java) to use the SDK to...
inspect every report in your environment.
determine which pattern the report fits.
add the data elements.
save the report.
I've developed an intranet system for our company which uses a SQL Server 2008 backend. This stores an awful lot of information and I'm frequently asked to build reports for various managers to help with the business. Quite often these reports are variations on a theme, whilst sometimes they're quite unique. At the moment I write SQL to perform the report and have them dump the required output via ASP.Net pages. What I'd really like to do is get away from that, and I was thinking along the lines of having the managers query the database using Excel so that they can decide what fields to filter on etc. To this end I wrote a couple of views and used Excel to connect to them. The problem is that without filtering you end up with a lot of data, so I was wondering about the best way to approach this. I've not had anything to do with data warehousing/Analysis Services but I wondered if that was a route to look at, or should I be looking at Reporting Services? I've got access to the full Microsoft stack so happy to use different solutions
I'm more then happy to spend some time doing some reading/research but I'm a bit unsure where to begin so any pointers would be gratefully received.
Thanks in advance
I'm looking to generate a report where the data is from multiple SQL queries. Some queries will have several columns/rows as output and I would like some control over what goes where.
Data is in a mySQL database. Formatted text or CSV would be fine as output. Would like to be able to automate this report.
Does anyone have recommendations on tools/libraries to do so?
You can do this with pretty much any reporting system. Windward Reports or Crystal Reports for paid. Jasper or Pentaho for free. (SSRS is out because you're on MySQL.) You can find a pretty good list at Reporting Software. The giant question you face is ease of use vs price.
If you're willing to pay for a commercial system, please take a look at Windward (disclaimer, I'm the CTO there). With Windward you design the report is Excel (best for your use), Word, or PowerPoint. So design & layout are a breeze. And yes, you can get output to XLSX, CSV, or pretty much anything else.
Our centralized IT department has suggested two primary ad hoc query tools for our general user base of approximately 200 staff members:
Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 2008 (SSMS)
Microsoft Access 2003
Environment
The backend database is a read-only Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database.
The schema is 400+ tables; allowing access to the raw data for our general staff would be a disaster.
We will be building an "abstraction layer" over the raw data for our general staff to run ad hoc queries against.
The abstraction layer will most likely contain a number of views.
A number of users have basic knowledge in Microsoft Access; none have used SSMS.
Which of the above tools (or alternative) would be best for a decidedly non-techie user base of approximately 200 people? What are the pros and cons of each?
Also, the IT department has suggested teaching people T-SQL so they may use SSMS. Is this reasonable?
How about this one? i-net Clear Reports (used to be called i-net Crystal-Clear) has a powerful ad-hoc reporting component that is made to be an easy-to-use thing for non-technical users. Your users won't have to know anything about reporting at all. They simply select the kind of report, the data et voila there is a report suiting the needs.
The data abstraction can be done easily by creating so called data-views which can be designed by e.g. your administration. There are various ways to access the ad hoc reporting GUI. We have a web GUI, a Java Applet or a standalone Java program.
The end users will not need any training since the GUI is highly intuitive.
The views can easily be build by drag and drop in addition to setting datatypes, formats and so on.
All reports (depending on security settings) can be accessed via DAV our a report repository gui.
The server supports different security settings on a per user or per group basis.
The standalone report designer is free and fully functional.
Disclosure: Yep. I work for the company who built this.
Your "abstraction layer" is the right approach to take with Access. Create an MDB with the basic views required linked into it and distribute to the users. Allow them to create new queries and reports in their own MDB as required.
Now how you are going to stop them from running a Cartesian join on tables with a million records or more I'm not quite sure.
Microsoft have a free tool for business and end users which called "Report Builder". It supports the full capabilities of SQL Server Reporting Services. The good thing it is provides a Microsoft Office look-like user interface.
You can download latest version "Report Builder 3.0" from here
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?DisplayLang=en&id=6116
And for more information about MS Report Builder check this link
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd207008.aspx
Attempting to teach "non-techie" people T-SQL to query a schema with 400+ tables probably isn't going to do well, unless they are limited to querying the views only, and the views hide all the ugly complexities of various joins, grouping etc.
Our company was in a similar situation where Access was used early on, and then we switched everyone over to use T-SQL and SSMS. IMO, this is the approach you'd want to take.
Again though, the success of this will depend on the quality of your views, or better yet, reports you provide your end-users.
Randy
I would look more into something like Stonefieldquery.com that is designed for non developers to build reports. Not that the report writer or query builder in Access is bad, but may be too much. I think they also provide a way to centralize reports and queries where they can be shared. Multiple people are not going to be able to open a single access file and create a report (I think query building is OK.).
Most will use the drag and drop capability, but about 5-10%will come thing a need for SQL and then you can take advantage of the "teachable moment" and get them some training.
Cons for Access certainly would be cost; SSMS should be free assuming you're properly licensed for the SQL server.
Depending on the actual needs, some users might actually be better off with Crystal Reports (never thought I'd say that), or Reporting Services.
you could create a series of sql server analysis cubes and have the users conenct to those using excel so that they can use excel's pivot tables.
Being a newbie at ad hoc reporting and doing the work myself, I used Izenda.com ad hoc reporting. It was very straight forward, and I could do it myself versus outsourcing.
Check SQLS*Plus - http://www.sqlsplus.com
I found SQLS*Plus to be a very effective command line SQL server reporting tool - this is a free tool (for personal use) and allows me to generate reports with the titles, headers, in HTML and CSV formats, format columns in custom masks, set report length, pagesize, etc. As I understand it is very similar to very well known Oracle SQL*Plus reporting tool
Is there a simpler interface for end users to run "queries" on pre-existing SqlServer Analysis Service cubes? I'm looking for a way to deploy the cubes and allow the users to work with the data through a simpler interface than BIDS. Is this even possible?
I would recommend Excel too. It is an environment that your users are familiar with anyway, and they will be able to perform additional analysis (totals etc) without learning any new interfaces.
However, I would advise against pivot tables as a method of getting the data into Excel. I once worked on a project using pivot tables, and it was a filthy nightmare. The more recent versions of Office have a slightly different tool called "Microsoft Office Excel Add-in for SQL Server Analysis Services" which can get OLAP data into Excel. I downloaded XLAddinSetup.msi for Excel 2002/3 or you can use this method for Excel 2007.
You can use Excel with pivot tables for that, no need to write any queries at all, they can drill down to all the data they need
There's a couple of End User Reporting Tools around.
Our tool - RSinteract, is quite cheap and effective. It uses an AJAXy web interface so no need to install on the client and has drag and drop functionality similar to the other tools. It also has a 30 day evaluation.
There are many, many tools. An incomplete overview can be found here: http://www.ssas-info.com/analysis-services-client-tools-frontend
Dundas has a set of tools that let you drag and drop dimensions/hierarchies/measures to create visualizations like charts and/or grids. The product name is Dundas Chart for ASP.NET Enterprise Edition, and it has a free demo.
ProClarity also had a suite of tools. Not sure how you get those tools any longer, but I think they are part of MSDN now.
As stated by Jay, there are several client tools you can use to query the cubes that give the end user the ability to drag and drop dimensions for ad-hoc querying.
ProClarity has been acquired by Microsoft, and most of the functionality is being incorporated into PerformancePoint
Panorama Software (original developers of Analysis Services) also provide access with their NovaView products
Another option is Report Builder, that comes for free with SQL Server.
Though the SQL Server 2005 version is a bit cranky, the new release with SQL Server 2008 seems to work much better.
Although it isn't as flexible as excel for ad-hoc queries,it comes very handy for some scenarios.