Anyone else stoked with Report Builder?!?
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If you've gotten your hands on the CTP (community tech preview ) of Sql 2005, you'll surely have seen the re-written Activeviews?
I think that this product will really fill a void in the Business User level of report building. Anyone else care to comment on it?
Steve.
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I've got the CTP installed but haven't had a play with it yet Steve. As soon as I do I'll try and remember to come back here and post some comments.
Could you compare it to any products that it is going to be going head-to-head against (e.g. BO's Web Intelligence I think)?
Jamie Thomson
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson -
I haven't looked at BO's product set but I have spent a fair amount of time with the Cognos suite and also Cizer's Report Builder & Quick Query (which I think they've now rolled into a single product).
For business users I prefer it to Cizer's products as it has the 'catalog' (or 'model' as MSft call it) that allows the developer to prescribe the boundaries that the user can create reports within (ie expose the tables, views, calc columns etc etc). Personally I like the 1 click install (feature of .net 2) as I'm a big fan of having the framework on every machine to allow for smart clients (thin with web deployment but usig the full power of the client rather than just jscript in a browser). In these ways, I don't see it as overly different to Cognos ReportNet ('cept that they are java boys from way back
), but I have a feeling it's possibly a little less powerful, especially in the olap analysis report creation. Where it does come to the fore though is the 'infinite drill through/down', where it recognises (because of the model) that you have built a summary query based on (say) customers and their total orders, so it makes the order total figure a link, and clicking it makes the server dynamically generate a new report that has the orders (filtered to that customer). And then you can drill the order total for the line items etc etc. I have just spent ages creating links between reports in RS2K, this would do away with all of those.Not sure if you've seen it but there is a downloadable webcast from nov/Dec last year that runs through the usage, not a bad one to watch as the webcasts go.
Just one gotch so far, as soon as i installed I wasn't able to actually create a new model, threw a datetime exception. Apparently this is a VS2K5 bug, which is worked around by setting your clock to GMT - but seeing as you're in the UK, you'll prob be GMT anyway
Cheers,
Steve
Steve.
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Haven't had a chance to get the CTP running yet
Can you advise if the ReportBuilder works with Standard Edition, not just Enterprise Edition?
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Colt 45 - the original point and click interface
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Hey Phil,
I have a feeling that it's only on enterprise (so we get it in dev too
). I saw a doc that had the main features per edition floating around, i will try to find it and will post the location if I can.[found it] http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2005/productinfo/sql2005features.asp Check the *very* last line, looks to be enterprise only.
Cheers,
steve
Steve.
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Well that sucks right royally. Seem that unless you've got an in-house development shop that can utilise the reporting controls, you only get good reporting functionality if you purchase Enterprise Edition!! With a cost of appoxs $40k per cpu that's way, way out of our league.
I don't know why MS couldn't provide a scaled feature set the same as for Integration Services and Analysis Services.
Looks like we're going to have to look elsewhere for our end-user reporting. Does anyone know of any other reporting packages that provide the "model" functionality that abstracts tables and fields from the
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Colt 45 - the original point and click interface -
Cognos, but there again they'll bleed you for the licenses.
ZAP (my old stomping ground) will have this type of functionality in by June/july, and Cizer *may* look at doing it at some stage.
ComOps (known in Aus for their mid-tier ERP) also have 'ComOps Relational' in their 'ComOps BI' toolkit, and but as with Zap, this is a SQL generator not an RDL generating tool, but both companies look to be wanting to embrace the concept of publishing to RS after report creation although neither have this yet.
Steve.
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I have tried the Report Builder and it is a very interesting beginning but it lacks a lot of features in this early version. Has anybody heard of it supporting Drill Downs? I can't find that kind of options.
Regards
Johan
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When you say drill Downs do you mean the [warning, marketing name ahead!] 'infinite drill through'? If so, then yes, I have seen and used this. Are you using the 'catalogs' available on the beta site or have you made your own?
What features do you see it lacking? I have tried it against cubes and this isn't exactly where it excels, it works much better against the relational source.
Steve.
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Cubes cannot be used with Report Builder yet. You must be mixing it up with the ordinary reports designed in BI Studio. I meant the reports entirely designed in a browser. It's new in the CTP February build.
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hey Johan, I'm definitely using the CTP, I thought if you changed the line in the dsv then it would all work?
<DataSourceView xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine">
Maybe that's where my problems were coming from?
It wasn't easy to get it to use AS as a datasource (ie the wizrd only allows you to select relational ones atm).Cheers,
Steve.
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Wow Steve
If you have found a way to use cubes and drill down its perfect! I read over at microsofts newsgroups that Cubes are not supported yet, in this release, and that was a microsoft employee writing it. One question, will the end user, who makes a new report, easily drag and drop a multilevel dimension on to the report and make it interactive (plus signs and all that)? By the way, I make my own Report Models.
Thanks in advance!
Johan
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To be honest it's been at least a week since i looked at it. I do remember trying to put a model together but hitting issues when trying to run reports off it.
I'm not sure exactly what they're looking at doing re: the olap reporting side, but i would have thought that the drill down would be more like a 'replace' method than an 'expansion' method based on the way that the 'infinite' drill through works (or my understanding of it thus far).
Steve.
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There is one obstacle in making your own report models, and that is that you have to edit xml behind the dataview. There are two timestamps in the beginning of each xml document. The stamps don't contain valid dates. The year is something like 0001. You have to change the dates to valid ones and you should be able to proccess. One other limitation, and that's why I was interested in your results, is that an error occurs in the generation of models if you don't use native sql connections. I managed to cycle through the whole process of making models to reports but I haven't found any way of making reports with interaction.
Regards
Johan
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