Yesterday SQL Server 2008 released (exactly 30 days from my post about it being on the horizon).
You can read the official press release here.
Robert Bruckner, from the SSRS product team, blogged about the release and some of the new features in SSRS.
I'll be testing out the RTM this weekend, while wrapping up my last chapter on the Wrox book on SSRS. I'll definitely put out a post about my favorite new features in SQL Server (not just SSRS)....although I can already tell you that I LOVE the Intellisense support for T-SQL within Management Studio...that is da bomb!
Go get your copy from MSDN or TechNet! And let's hear some comments and feedback.
Showing posts with label Sql Server. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sql Server. Show all posts
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Sunday, June 08, 2008
News from TechEd 2008 - Developer
TechEd 2008 Developer is now officially over, and I am back to my normal life. I must admit that the ride to Florida didn't start off as I planned: my AA flight had an "engine malfunction" and had to return to the airport shortly after takeoff. It gave us a scare but thankfully we were safe.
The conference was fun and I had the pleasure to meet some great new folks as well as see and talk with some well known people in the Microsoft developer community, including Scott Hanselman, Carl Franklin, Juval Lowy, Marc Mercuri, and Ted Neward.
Bill Gates' last official keynote as a Microsoft "employee" (does he count as an employee?) was interesting as he slowly revealed the tip of the iceberg for Microsoft's latest vision for the Software+Services offerings and the newest additions to their development efforts.
This was my 3rd TechEd event, and I have noticed a pattern with attendees: newbies tend to want to attend every possible session, especially those with renowned speakers, while seasoned developers and architects stick to the TLC (Technical Learning Centers), hands on labs, and 1-1 meetings with the product groups.
I realized that when I noticed I'd only attended 5 sessions altogether, and had spent quite a bit of time talking with other like-minded individuals, networking, swapping biz cards, and interacting with Microsoft program managers and developers.
Below are some of the latest announcements from TechEd 2008 Developers (and I expect the IT Pro week to provide another handful of these):
The conference was fun and I had the pleasure to meet some great new folks as well as see and talk with some well known people in the Microsoft developer community, including Scott Hanselman, Carl Franklin, Juval Lowy, Marc Mercuri, and Ted Neward.
Bill Gates' last official keynote as a Microsoft "employee" (does he count as an employee?) was interesting as he slowly revealed the tip of the iceberg for Microsoft's latest vision for the Software+Services offerings and the newest additions to their development efforts.
This was my 3rd TechEd event, and I have noticed a pattern with attendees: newbies tend to want to attend every possible session, especially those with renowned speakers, while seasoned developers and architects stick to the TLC (Technical Learning Centers), hands on labs, and 1-1 meetings with the product groups.
I realized that when I noticed I'd only attended 5 sessions altogether, and had spent quite a bit of time talking with other like-minded individuals, networking, swapping biz cards, and interacting with Microsoft program managers and developers.
Below are some of the latest announcements from TechEd 2008 Developers (and I expect the IT Pro week to provide another handful of these):
- SQL Server 2008 RC0 - this means they're really close to shipping!
- Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2
- Microsoft "Velocity" CTP1 - distributed in-memory caching
Sunday, April 13, 2008
What's up with the new SSRS 2008 Report Designer
Here’s the scoop from developer to developer, per the last comments and feedback from the MS product team for SSRS:
The new Report Designer for 2008 will be included, as of CTP6 and into RTM, in Visual Studio 2008, and also as a standalone installed application. This is significant because it means that business analysts and information workers do not have to license and install Visual Studio (a developer-oriented environment) in order to design/develop reports for SSRS. In SSRS 2005, the only other option that end-users had to develop reports was the Report Builder application.
Report Builder – RB 2005 – is a click-once Windows Forms application that allows users to create ad-hoc reports. However it limits users to retrieving data from Report Models (SMDL files) that were deployed to a report server. Report Models had to created beforehand, by a developer, well-versed in the data structures (DB, Cubes, etc) and business needs, in order to provide the appropriate entities and fields that could be consumed by ad-hoc reports in RB. An interesting concept that came from SMDL and the models is that of infinite drill-through. Basically, the idea is that once the model is created, and a report consumes that modeled data, a field that is displayed on the report can be clicked by the end-user allowing them to drill into the information. The semantic model would understand relationships and hierarchies presented by the data, and provided a generated report with all the attributes and aggregates that were significant to the drilled down information. In theory, the user could keep on clicking through the data “infinitely.”
Unfortunately, the latest I've heard from the SSRS product team on this topic was that, while the SSRS 2008 Standalone Report Designer (codename “blue”) would allow users to create reports, using the same design interface as developers in Visual Studio, which consume SMDL models, they would not be able to perform “infinite drill-through” using these reports, and they would not get an integrated query designer.
In order to address that shortcoming, they chose to keep the 2005 RB click-once application with the RTM version of SSRS 2008. Once they’ve completed this feature with the new designer, they will release the updated Report Designer (blue). This will come in the form of a SQL Server Service Pack (probably SP1).
To summarize, when SQL Server 2008 is released, developers will get the new report designer in Visual Studio 2008,and users will get the standalone version of the same design tool. and users will continue to get RB 2005 deployment from Report Manager. the "blue" designer will be available in the SQL Server installation media, but not installed by default, starting with the next CTP Refresh. Once "blue" is installed, users will be able to write reports for all the out-of-the-box data providers (not just report models), but will not be able to create reports with infinite drill-through capabilities.
The new Report Designer for 2008 will be included, as of CTP6 and into RTM, in Visual Studio 2008, and also as a standalone installed application. This is significant because it means that business analysts and information workers do not have to license and install Visual Studio (a developer-oriented environment) in order to design/develop reports for SSRS. In SSRS 2005, the only other option that end-users had to develop reports was the Report Builder application.
Report Builder – RB 2005 – is a click-once Windows Forms application that allows users to create ad-hoc reports. However it limits users to retrieving data from Report Models (SMDL files) that were deployed to a report server. Report Models had to created beforehand, by a developer, well-versed in the data structures (DB, Cubes, etc) and business needs, in order to provide the appropriate entities and fields that could be consumed by ad-hoc reports in RB. An interesting concept that came from SMDL and the models is that of infinite drill-through. Basically, the idea is that once the model is created, and a report consumes that modeled data, a field that is displayed on the report can be clicked by the end-user allowing them to drill into the information. The semantic model would understand relationships and hierarchies presented by the data, and provided a generated report with all the attributes and aggregates that were significant to the drilled down information. In theory, the user could keep on clicking through the data “infinitely.”
Unfortunately, the latest I've heard from the SSRS product team on this topic was that, while the SSRS 2008 Standalone Report Designer (codename “blue”) would allow users to create reports, using the same design interface as developers in Visual Studio, which consume SMDL models, they would not be able to perform “infinite drill-through” using these reports, and they would not get an integrated query designer.
In order to address that shortcoming, they chose to keep the 2005 RB click-once application with the RTM version of SSRS 2008. Once they’ve completed this feature with the new designer, they will release the updated Report Designer (blue). This will come in the form of a SQL Server Service Pack (probably SP1).
To summarize, when SQL Server 2008 is released, developers will get the new report designer in Visual Studio 2008,
When SP1 for SQL 2008 is done (or the next available update after RTM), the new Report Designer will have incorporated all of the missing features available in RB 2005, and Microsoft will phase out the RB 2005 tool at that point, in favor of “blue.”
LET’S NOT FORGET ALL THE OTHER NEW FEATURES IN SSRS 2008:
Re-designed memory management (say goodbye to memory leaks in your report servers).
- Directly leveraging HTTP.sys driver - does away with dependency on IIS. This reduces server footprint (and possible attack surface) on dedicated report servers, and allows all of the Reporting Services components to function within one single application pool, under one windows service, by one single service account. This also makes server deployment a breeze.
- Integration of the acquired Dundas Charts and Gauges component – this brings new charts and gauges, with tons of new features that will allow users to create very pretty reports.
- Say good bye to the old matrix and table paradigm…..hello, TABLIX!
- New MS Word (2003) rendering extension, will allow users to export reports to Word .doc files.
- Still get all the neat SharePoint integration features….
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Report Designers For SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 - CTP5 and future
I've seen a lot of questions and misunderstanding as to how these products are bundled/SKU'd and what Microsoft's plans are for when SQL Server 2008 RTMs, and what designer will be supported by what IDE. So I'll try to explain, to the best of my knowledge, how these different permutation of SQL and VS versions work together.
Visual Studio 2005/2008 is an IDE shell that can include several dev environments, such as C#, C++, VB, ASP.NET/HTML, RDL/RptProj, etc.
When you install SQL Server 2005 or 2008 (CTP), and specify the client/dev tools option, the setup will check if you already have a SKU of Visual Studio 2005 installed, and if you do, it will only need to install the Report Designer and RptProject support into your existing VS shell.
However if you did not have VS 2005 installed, the setup for SSRS will install the VS shell, and the Report Designer and RptProject. This shell with only support for SSRS (and SSAS, SSIS, if you were installing those as well) is branded BI Development Studio (BIDS).
BIDS is not really a different application than Visual Studio 2005. You can notice, because when you click the BIDS shortcut on your Start/Programs menu, it will show the VS 2005 splash screen. You can also check the target path of the shortcut and notice that it's the same as the target path of your original VS 2005 shortcut (if you did have VS prior to installing SSRS).
When you're developing reports in BIDS/VS, you don't need to have a Report Server installed on that machine (this would be called the "client tools" only installation of SQL Server Reporting Services). You do need a Report Server if you plan to deploy your reports after development.
With regards to VS 2008, I believe that unfortunately the current November CTP5 does not integrate the BIDS/Report Designer into the IDE. So, in other words, you cannot yet use VS 2008 to develop SSRS 2008 Reports.
You will need to either have already installed the VS 2005 IDE, so SQL 2008 can install the report designer bits, or just let the SQL Server 2008 setup install BIDS (which is still the 2005 IDE).
**Note that Microsoft released an update for support of SQL Server 2008 in VS 2005 (you'd receive errors when trying to connect to a SQL 2008 DB from the Server Explorer). This is NOT related to the report designer.
Another thing to keep in mind is that for SSRS 2008, there's a new RDL schema (with the new Tablix report item, and other neat stuff), but as of this CTP5, you can only work with this schema from the Standalone Report Designer preview, that is installed with the CTP5. If you try to open an RDL created from this designer, using BIDS/VS 2005, you should receive an error, because you can only work with 2005-schema RDLs in BIDS/VS 2005.
According to the SSRS team, once SQL 2008 RTMs, they will have integrated the codebase of the new designer, found in the standalone designer preview, with VS 2008/BIDS. It may even be as soon as the next CTP6, but until then, if you want to create brand spanking new SSRS 2008 reports, then you must use the Standalone Designer Preview. If you deploy 2005 RDLs to a SSRS 2008 Report Server, they will be "upgraded" under-the-hood to 2008 in order for the reports to be usable in that version of SSRS.
Not unlike when SQL 2005 was released, and you were forced to convert your SSRS 2000 reports to the new 2005 schema in order to work with them in VS 2005/BIDS, or be forced to have VS.NET 2003 installed to continue to support the SQL 2000 schemas; so will you have to follow the same rules when going from 2005 to 2008. Unfortunately, that's a limitation in how the Report Designer in VS targets a specific schema version for RDLs, so it can't work with multiple schemas.
If you want this feature, go to the Microsoft Connect site, and enter your feature request for RDL version multi-targeting in VS 2008 :-)
I hope this clears up any misunderstanding.
So to sum it up:
Current November CTP5 - has 2 designers: BIDS and Standalone.
- standalone designer preview gives a little taste of what's to come, and is the only way to work directly with the new 2008 schema and features (e.g. Tablix, etc...).
- BIDS has not yet changed, and will work with RDLs in the SQL 2005 schema only, but once you try to deploy to a SSRS 2008 CTP Report Server, the server does an under-the-hood upgrade of the RDL to 2008 so it can store it in the DB.
Future CTPs and RTM Plans - 2 designers: BIDS/VS 2008 for developers, and a Standalone (with Office 2007 Ribbon UI) for Information Workers who don't "live" in Visual Studio.
- standalone designer and VS 2008/BIDS will provide much of the same functionality when developing reports, with the only difference being that BIDS will be hosted in a VS 2008 shell, while the standalone designer will be, well, standalone. And it will have a Ribbon UI (from Office 2007), so non-dev folks don't freak out, but rather feel familiar and comfortable while developing their SSRS reports (this will not be the same as the Report Builder!!!).
If you have SSRS 2005 reports, and you don't wish to convert them to 2008, DON'T OPEN THEM in Visual Studio 2008. For all your SSRS 2008 Reports, you will need the Standalone designer, and eventually either that or VS 2008. You will need to have both versions (2005 and 2008) of BIDS/Visual Studio installed side-by-side (which is supported by Microsoft), if you have to support both RDL versions.
Cheers!
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