I am currently working on TFS 2013 and would like to know how to generate custom reports.
Tried google to find out a tutorial but couldn't find anything great. If someone has then please let me know.
Whether SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Reporting Service will be ok for TFS 2013 to generate reports?
TFS has a few mechanisms for doing reporting:
Work Item Queries (WIQ) - Work Item Queries can be created and saved for reuse. Work Item Queries are easy to create, and can answer the majority of questions that users have.
Excel Reporting - Work Item Queries can be exported to Excel to provide more advanced capabilities around analyzing the data resulting from the Query. Various different views of the data along with charts/graphs can be created using standard Excel functionality. Creating Excel Reports requires some expertise in Excel, but the resulting file can be saved and the data can be automatically refreshed from TFS.
SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) - This is the most advanced Reporting option. SSRS reports require a developer to create, but it provides the flexibility to report and analyze any data stored in TFS in almost any way imaginable.
TFS Web Access (TWA) - TFS Web Access provides some basic charts/graphs that can be viewed in the browser (Burndown, Cumulative Flow, Velocity Chart, etc). In addition, web-based Charts/Graphs can be generated based on the results of Work Item Queries. This is less flexible than the Excel option, but also more user-friendly and usable by any TFS user.
The advanced option - SSRS Reports - are just your run-of-the-mill SSRS reports that use the TFS Data Warehouse and/or the TFS Cube as a data source. You can read a guide about developing custom SSRS reports for TFS here: http://vsarreportguide.codeplex.com/
Related
I've been using SSRS 2012 for a while now. Keep in mind I'm currently using SSRS 2012 but have set up a 2016 server and will be migrating about 200 reports within the next few months. Just went to PBI training and found out about the new Power BI Server that can sit on top of SSRS. Exciting in that we're in healthcare and cannot use the PBI publishing service for HIPAA reasons. But, I wanted to be sure I understand some things:
In SSRS, you can create a datasource and datasets that are used
regularly for efficiency and to keep down storage sizes. In
PBIRServer, it appears that you create each datasource and the
individual datasets used and store separately for each report. Is
this accurate and doesn't that seem like a step back?
Can I include SSRS reports and BPI reports/dashboards on the same
site?
If we're going to set up a local PBIRServer, can we develop using
PBIpro with about 5-10 pro users but then let the folks that
basically just want to view data use the free version?
If we develop using PBIpro can we still publish to the PBIRServer
with mobile formats? Documentation seems to indicate we need a
different development tool with a much higher cost.
Can you include a hyperlink from PBIRServer reports/dashboards that
to a specific report on the same server? I’m seeing this being used
via PBI for the visuals and then the drill-down-to as the existing
SSRS reports. They’re working great for our current purposes.
Is there a publication that articulates some of these specifics?
Thanks so much!
I think the first thing to keep in mind is that reportserver 2016 and power bi reportserver 2016 are different products. Licensing Power BI reportserver can only be obtained by either buying power bi premium capacity or have an enterprise sql server with Software Assurance
PBI premium: Costprice for this will be 5000$ a month
power bi price calculator
SQL Server Enterprise: $14,256 per corepack , 2 are required + SA
I can't answer all other question, but for question 2:
Yes you can deploy power bi and regular reports to a pbiRS server.
Question 3:
When you develop locally you have to use the power bi desktop for reporting services. To deploy this to a pbi RS you are not required to have a pbi pro license. Since you are using on premise resources, you will follow the licensing model of sql reportserver. The users connecting to the reportserver are no power bi users, just regular ssrs consumers install power bi desktop for report services
If I understand your questions well, you might need to install both, depending on organization size, report creators number and report users number.
SSRS for those people who are OK using standard reports only (with exposed datasources and standard layout design tool) so SSRS yes included with your SQL Server license
Power BI Report Server (SQL Enterprise+Assurance or PBI Premium license) for more sophisticated reports for business people; but to design/publish these reports you need Power BI Pro licence, per report developer
We currently have our custom application that is being distributed with our database (SQL 2005/2008). It is an easy task, before we release a new version we just pack our database into SQL initialization scripts (these create tables and populate data). We use SQL Management studio to generate these scripts.
As a next step we would like to deploy OLAP cube (along with ETL commands made with Integration Services) that would be used to analyze the data in the original database. .
We know to create and design a cube, but I do not even know how could be generalize all these packages and deploy them as a solution, script or something that our customers could install on their servers. Customers do not have a Visual studio and we need to create "something" in a wizard (with some input required from customer e.g. OLAP cube name, server etc) for them to deploy it.
How do you do that?
From Here:
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis
Services (SSAS) provides three tools
for deploying an Analysis Services
database onto an Analysis Services
server in the production environment:
Using an XML Script Use SQL Server Management Studio to generate an XML
script of the metadata of an existing
Analysis Services database, and then
run that script on another server to
recreate the initial database.
Using the Analysis Services Deployment Wizard Use the Analysis
Services Deployment Wizard to use the
XMLA output files generated by an
Analysis Services project to deploy
the project’s metadata to a
destination server.
Synchronizing Analysis Services Databases Use the Synchronize
Database Wizard to synchronize the
metadata and data between any two
Analysis Services databases.
In addition to using one of the
deployment tools, you can deploy
Analysis Services by using the backup
and restore functionality. For more
information, see Backing Up and
Restoring an Analysis Services
Database.
The Analysis Services Deployment Wizard can be found in your start menu under SQL 2005, Analysis Services, Deployment Wizard. This takes the asdatabase file in your bin directory and creates an XMLA script that creates the SSAS database.
Links:
Using the Analysis Services Deployment Wizard
Readme for Ascmd Command-line Utility Sample
Or alternatively, you can use a tool to build the Cubes and Schemas that provide a simple mechanism for deploying initial implementations and a smooth upgrade path.
As you know deployment, isn't just a case of implementing a database even an OLAP database in the target environment. There's also the ETL, and tables to consider, which also involves ensuring that at every step of the way you're creating table/SQL scripts, and all this is fine and dandy until you come to provide an upgrade to your product, and need to upgrade the SSIS/DW Relational Schema Tables and SSAS Cube structures.
What you find is MS is no help at all here. It's helpful for initial deployments, but doesn't provide much in the way of in situ upgrades.
This is a problem that we have faced up to and developed a tool to address, so that we're able to do the things that you are trying to do, but do them smoothly. Leaving our technicians to focus on building high quality Data Warehouses, rather than technologies to do mundane, annoying, fraught with danger but necessary things like "upgrades".
Check out http://www.dataacademy.com, this is the product we've developed to do successfully, just what you are trying to do. Drop me a mail, if you'd like to discuss further.
Cheers and the best of luck.
In Short
I am thoroughly confused by the array of SQL Server services available, and am having a hard time finding a brief primer.
The Scoop
I am a long time ASP.Net developer who has happily been churning out ASP.Net applications for years. These have usually been based on SQL server and a range of custom tables and views.
Just recently I have had the need to do some reporting that goes a little beyond the straight forward, and so I have started to look into SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). In doing so I feel like i have opened up Pandora's Box.
There is reporting services, integration services, Analysis services, Business intelligence, etc etc. This has got me wondering what they all do, and if I could (or should have been) leveraging these tools to do some of the heavy lifting for .net applications.
My immediate research efforts on Microsoft have stifled me with impenetrable marketing and business speak. My Google searched have turned up no comprehensive overview of what these tools are, or they fit together, or even which tool should be used when. One of the biggest problems i am having comprehending the options is that they all seem kind of the same to me!
So, all of this to say, if some kind sole could set me straight and point me in the right direction, I would be very grateful :)
Very high level overview:
Core services for the database engine itself consist of the SQL Server service itself (or MSSQLSERVER) and there's also the SQL Server Agent and the SQL Server Browser. The SQL Server Agent is a job scheduler for SQL Server and handles some other maintenance tasks and so on, while the Browser service helps with accepting logins and so on by creating an easier way for client applications to connect to SQL Server.
All three of these services though are true 'services' in the sense that they're daemons running on your server. But of these three, you ONLY need MSSQLSERVER running to be able to work with the relational database engine. (The other two services are optional.)
Then, in addition to core database engine functionality, there are a bunch of add-ons or supplemental 'products' and tools that Microsoft Offers to help make SQL Server that much better and more compelling as a platform/offering. As you've seen, these are typically marketed as 'services'.
Reporting Services (or SSRS) is a great solution that uses a native SQL Server database to store information about data sources, report delivery schedules, access permissions, and so on... for a powerful reporting engine that makes it very easy to output great reports from pretty much ANY data source. You just define sources for the reports, wire up datasets and parameters, then use a specialized xml markup (Report Definition Language or RDL) to define look, feel, shape, and so on of your reports. And, Microsoft has created a 'tweaked' version of Visual Studio to make creating/developing/editing these reports much easier. That version of visual studio is called SQL Server Business Intelligence Design Studio (or BIDS).
Likewise, Microsoft also uses BIDS to help developers, DBAs, and analysts create data cubes - multidimensionally 'joined' tables using a specialized schema that allows SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to churn through pretty much any combination of data relations in order to provide 'analytical data'. So... say you have a company selling widgets: you could define relationships between products, customers, sales regions, dates, and so on - and SSAS will take that data (along with specially defined 'cube' definitions that define those relationships, their granularity, and so on) and pre-calculate the outcome to pretty much any combination of those 'dimensions' or angles of data - so that you could say something like: "Show me all x-brand widgets sold by sales people in the northwest region in January of this year.." and it would give you a sum of those parts sold... and even let you drill-down by sales person, store, and so on - assuming you've defined your cube/relationships as needed.
Of course, this functionality is pretty powerful, but you almost never want these cubes running against your production tables... so companies typically create data warehouses or data marts to store their analytic data in. But to copy data on a regular basis from production into these warehouses/marts.. you need some kind of tool that makes it easy to figure out which changes should be picked up, how they should be handled, and what kinds of tweaks/changes you need to make to them to get them out of a highly-normalized production environment into a highly DEnormalized warehouse/data mart (where you're using snowflake or star schemas)...
And this tool/service is none other than SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) - which has a rich set of connectors, pumps, transforms, monitors, and so on to facilitate data transformations and migrations on a scheduled basis. What's very cool about this tool/service though... is that it doesn't just connect/transform data between SQL Server and SQL Server... but it's able to connect MOST data sources to MOST data sources - so it's a powerful tool for transforming, exporting, importing, modifying, tweaking, and so on all of your data.
And... to define the 'workflows' for your integration/transformation projects, you also use Business Intelligence Design Studio - same as with defining cubes and so on for SQL Server Analysis Services.
Ultimately though, what makes all of these so cool is that you get access to:
SQL Server
SQL Server Reporting Services
SQL Server Integration Services
SQL Server Analysis Services
With SQL Server Standard and Enterprise Editions - so there's no need to buy extra tools/solutions/offerings in order to be able to take advantage of these great features. (The Enterprise Edition of SQL Server which costs about 5x as much as Standard... comes with much better/cooler features in some ways ... but you still get a solid subset of all features using the Standard Edition.)
Here is a basic overview of the services:
Analysis Services: This is Microsoft's data warehousing solution. It allows you to create data cubes and other warehousing features. Provides tools to make it easier to create what-if scenarios. This runs on top of SQL Server. Data warehousing is also referred to as Business Intelligence applications because the warehouses are used to mine and analyze data.
Reporting Services: Allows you to build database reports more easily. It provides a report designer and management functionality. This service is supposed to make it easier and faster to create rich reports. The reporting service also works against non-SQL Server data services.
Integration Services: Provides functionality to build Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) functionality. ETL tools integrate individual data sets and help with extracting, aggregating, cleaning and uploading data. Like the other services, it provides a GUI that is supposed to make these packages easier to create.
You aren't required to use the three services in one bunch but they do provide functionality when used together. For example, you may use Analysis Services to create data cubes, Integration Services to extract the data from an external service and import it into your cube, and the Reporting Services to create reports that contain business metrics from the data contained in the cube.
As to whether you should be/have been using them, as always, it depends. The services provide some great services but don't always fit the project. For example, Reporting Services do make it easier to create reports but, in my experience, it isn't friendly enough for the end-user report authoring as it is advertised. Integration services are great to do some ETL jobs but isn't as flexible as was sometimes required. I used this service in a few projects but it always ended up being more trouble than I would have expected. But definitely, take a look at them.
I am working on an ASP.NET (3/5) web application. In the application, we assemble lists of classes from a variety of data sources. I would like to create a report in SQL Server SSRS that renders a report from the contents of one of those lists, without pushing the list to the database (in fact, it would be a violation of a bunch of rules if we did that). Right now we are using SQL Server 2005 but we are considering a move to 2008. Is what I want to do possible and, if so, how do I do it?
Reporting services offer something called as DataSet extensions. You may use that to render the report from your custom data source. You do not need to load them back into database. However, certain editions of SQL like SQL Express reporting services does not support dataset extension.
You might want to use the ReportViewer control which ship with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008.
It can run in a "local mode", which doesn't require a Report Server backend. You simply drop it from the VS toolbox onto an ASPX form, then wire it up in code with any IEnumerable collection as its datasource, and then provide it with a report definition file for local mode (RDLC).
The RDLC file is basically the same as the original RDL (report definition language), but it omits a few things like the datasource, which is provided by your application. The ReportViewer control contains a smaller version of the report processing engine, so that at runtime, it "couples" the RDLC you provide with a data set or bindable collection, and it does the rest.
For more details on this control, check out the following site: www.gotreportviewer.com
HTH
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.