With the change from IIS to their own web server in SSRS, we are now experiencing problems with using web trends to track our report utilization. Web trends said it was not supported, has anyone found a way to make it work?
Not that I know, sorry.
Usually, you "roll your own" by mining the ExecutionLog table in the ReportServer database. This has lots of useful information on users, parameters, durations, errors etc.
There's far more information here than the IIS logs
I assume you're using the Native Reporting Mode. If you switch it to Sharepoint Integrated mode I would imagine you could get some logging working again.
Related
I am looking into developing a new user registration system for my company. In the past we have made use of ASP.net for all web development.
Due to the huge charge associated with this I am looking at moving towards a more open source alternative. The issue at the moment is that the db we have is SQL Server and we have no way of changing this in the forth coming future.
Has anyone any experience of building a django application with SQL Server backend for the database?
I would most like to hear of any issues you may have faced.
Thanks
Looks like there's some decent resources out there:
http://code.google.com/p/django-mssql/
http://code.google.com/p/django-pyodbc/
https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DjangoOnWindowsWithIISAndSQLServer
I personally don't have experience with it, and the backporting of your models from db->code could possibly be a painful step. Also, it seems like most of these packages want to work with sqlserver 2000 or 2005, so hopefully you are not using 2008.
After reading through some articles on LightSwitch, I'm left wondering what prevents a LightSwitch user creating queries that over load the data-source, mainly SQL databases.
From my initial understanding, a LightSwitch user is not a developer or DB admin, and may little understanding of the impact a seemingly simple query can have on a multi-user database.
Does LightSwitch have built in governance, caching etc, is it safe to let the user have access to the last years sales data?
I don't believe there is anything built into LightSwitch for this, however this should be able to be handled on the DB server.
If you're running SQL Server 2008 they've got resource governance built in.
MSDN SQL 2008 Resource Governance
Specific example
So I'm inexperienced in hosting DB's and I've always had the luxury of someone else getting the db setup.
I was going to help a friend out with getting a webpage setup, I've got experience in Asp.Net MVC so I'm going with that. They want to setup a search page to query a db and display the results. My question I have is in getting the DB setup and hosted. They currently just have the Access DB on a local computer. There is basically only one table that would need to be queried for the search.
What is the best approach to getting this table/db accessible? They would like to keep the main copy of the db on the local machine, so copying the entire db over to the hosted site would be time consuming, could the lone table needed be solely copied to the host? Should I try to convince them to make changes on the hosted db and just make copies of that for their local machines? Any suggestions are welcome, Again I'm a total noob when it comes to hosting databases.
Thanks
Added: They are using a MS Access 2000, and the page will have access restrictions. Thanks for the responses.
How about SQL Server Express? I think you can do a remote connect from Access and just push the data over from Access.
I wouldn't use Access on a web server in any case.
I would strongly recommend against access from web work, its just not designed for it and given that SQL server express is free there is no reason not to give it a go.
You can migrate the data over by using the SQL server upsizing wizard, here is a link for help on using that feature
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/237980
It depends on what you mean by web work? Access 2010 can build scalable browser neutral web applications. They can scale to 1000's to users. In fact, you can even park the web sites on Microsoft's new cloud hosting options, and scale out to as many users as you need.
Here is a video of an application I wrote in access 2010. Note how at the half way I run the same application including the Access forms in a standard web browser. This application was built 100% inside of the Access client. The end result needs no ActiveX or Silverlight to run.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU4mH0jPntI
So, the above shows that access can now be used to build scale web sites (you can ignore the confusing answers by the other two posters here they are not quite up to speed on how access works or functions).
However, for your case, I would continue to have the access database on the desktop. You can simply link to tables that are hosted on the web server. Those tables can exist in MySql, or sql server. As long as the web site supports external ODBC connections (many do), then you can thus have the desktop application use the live data from the web server. If connections to the live data at all times is a issue, then you could certainly setup something to send up new records (or the whole table) on some kind of interval or perhaps the reverse, and pull down new records on a interval from the web site (depends which way you need to go). So, connecting to MySql or sql server is quite easy as long as the web hosting and site permits external ODBC connections. I do this all the time, and it works quite well.
As mentioned, new for access 2010 is web site building ability but that does requite Access Web services running on SharePoint.
You don't need to upgrade to Access 2010. One option is to use the EQL Data plugin to sync the database up to the server. Then you can write an asp.net, php, or whatever application that queries the table using the EQL API and prints the results however you want. This kb article describes how to use the EQL API from a web app.
The nice thing is that the database is still totally usable (and at full speed) even when you're not online, and then you can sync the new data up to the web occasionally. It only uploads the changes, not the entire database every time, so it's fast.
Disclaimer: I work at EQL Data so I'm a bit biased. But this kind of use case is the whole reason the company exists.
To all,
I have noticed that other reporting tools allow you the option, at the time of running a report from the web interface, to either have it rendered to the browser or allow you to enter an email address have have the report sent to that address. This would be helpful for long running reports or reports that are fairly large.
My question is whether this can be done with the existing sql server 2008 report server toolset or if there are third part solutions available?
Thanks.
--sean
I don't think that what you are wanting to do is possible out of the box.
This may seem like overkill for your situation, however, I have worked for a client who wanted some custom features like this. Given that Report Manager is so inflexible out of the box, we wrote a new front end leveraging the Reporting Services Service. We could then write our own extended capabilities right into the new viewer.
This link describes it a bit more.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159218.aspx
You can setup a subscription on a report which will email it too you once or at regular intervals.
This Link give you more info. Be aware that if you want data driven subscriptions you need enterprise sql server.
Scenarion:
I am having a web application which is going to use SqlServerReport(SSRS) sitting on ReportingServer which is on my DatabaseServer.
There is a firewall between webapplication & SqlserverReport server.
Now how safe is it to use reports directly from webserver (ie accessing something there on database server.)
We use a appserver to interact with the database data.
All basic calls are
UI ==> AppServer ==> DatabaseServer (general cases) :) happy
UI ==> DatabaseServerReports (to access Sqlserver reports) :(
So my concern is how safe is to access reports directly from Databaseservers.
Yo need to open the ports 80(http)/443(https) in the firewall to using the SSRS server from the AppServer.
Please, contact your Network Admin.
Our security folks made us install IIS on a separate partition.
Why not use your app to display the reports? With ASP.NET you can use a report viewer control to display the report so the user has no idea where the report is coming from except that it is within the application.
How safe depends on where the user is located. SQL Server Reporting Services was not intended to be opened up to the Internet, for instance. Neither was the SQL Server database engine, for that matter. You said there's a firewall between the web server and the SQL Server, but that's not an unusual configuration in internal networks nowadays.
The concern that might come up is one from the performance side, more than any other. By viewing the reports using SSRS, the report rendering will occur on the same server as your database engine. If the hardware isn't enough for both roles, you'll see performance issues.