Microsoft introduced an interactive data exploration, visualization and presentation experience called Power View with SQL Server 2012. Power View reports are presentation-ready at all times because they are always connected to your data. Users can quickly create a variety of visualizations, from tables and matrices to bubble charts and sets of small multiple charts. Power View operates on a BI Semantic Model that resides in Analysis Services databases or PowerPivot workbooks.

With the SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU 4, Power View can consume data from multidimensional models. Now Power View users can connect to both the tabular and multidimensional formats of the BI Semantic Model. This is achieved through native support for Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) in Analysis Services multidimensional models, ensuring optimal performance and functionality. SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU4 contains a few additional enhancements to the “Power View for Multidimensional Models – Preview” released in November 2012. Stay tuned for a deeper dive on the functionality in a future post!

In summary, the Power View for Multidimensional Models release delivers the following and more:

1. Connectivity:

Power View connectivity to Multidimensional Models in SSRS SharePoint mode.                                                                                                                                            

2. Power View Visualization of Multidimensional Models:

Once connected to your Multidimensional data model, all the Power View stunning data visualizations are available at your fingertips.  In addition, some unique features of multidimensional models that now provide an improved experience to the Power View user.

3. Perspectives and Translations

Multidimensional models can have various perspectives where only certain dimensions and measures are visible. Power View supports connecting to a specific perspective via the connect string in RSDS file where you need to specify the perspective name as value to the Cube connection string property.

4. Power View Pinned Filters

One of the additional features of this release is the ability to specify that a filter should apply across all views of the Power View report.

5. Security

A user connecting to a cube via Power View is authenticated and evaluated for appropriate permissions. When a user has dimension security applied then the respective dimension members will not be seen by the user in Power View.

Link Summary:

• Power View For Multidimensional Models Documentation
• Download Power View For Multidimensional Models (SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU4)
• PowerView for Multidimensional Models Demo @ SQL Pass

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Do I need to upgrade SSAS & SSRS in SharePoint mode?

    Answer: Yes, you need to upgrade your SSAS & SSRS installed in SharePoint mode.

2. Can I upgrade from existing SQL Server 2012 installation?

    Answer: Yes, you can upgrade from an existing SQL Server 2012 installation.

3. In which editions is Power View support for multidimensional mode enabled?

    Answer: Enterprise and Business Intelligence editions.

4. Can I send DAX queries to multidimensional models?

    Answer: Yes, you can send DAX queries to multi-dimensional models.

5. Will Power View in Excel (on-prem or in the cloud) be able to connect to multi-dimensional models (cubes)?

    Answer: No, this update is only supported on stand alone SharePoint (2010 and 2013) mode.

6. When will Power View in Excel to connect to Multidimensional models?

    Answer: Enabling this scenario is a top priority for the team but we do not have any updates on the roadmap or timeframe to share at this time.

Enjoy!

In this posting, I am very happy to announce the availability of “Professional Reporting Services 2012”. After the successful Report Design Recipes book focusing on best practices and report design patterns, it was time to work on a comprehensive book covering the entire Reporting Services 2012 product. For example, the book includes about 100 pages of brand new contents I dedicated solely to Power View and tabular models with PowerPivot (chapters 12 and 13). An extraordinary amount of thanks goes to my co-authors; Paul Turley, Thiago Silva, Ken Withee, and Grant Paisley!

My esteemed colleague Ariel Netz (Partner Group Program Manager for SQL Server Reporting Services) graciously wrote the foreword of our book. I think the following paragraph quoted from Ariel’s foreword summarizes in a great way what to expect from this book:

“What I really like about Professional SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services is that it’s a perfect reflection of the Microsoft BI journey through the eyes of the Reporting Services product line, from the early days of managed and operational to the latest addition of self-service reporting. This book was written by experts who built the product and have implemented it at customers’ sites. Together they have more than 40 years of business intelligence experience.
I call this book the encyclopedia of SQL Server Reporting Services.”

This book covers a wide range of topics in depth:

• Demonstrates self-service reporting with Report Builder, using wizards, and simple design tools
• Helps you design highly visual and attractive business reports with dynamic formatting, drill-down, and drill-through actions
• Provides the tools to build BI dashboards, scorecards, and performance indicators
• Demonstrates building BI Semantic Models, interactively exploring data in Power View, and creating compelling presentations
• Features helpful examples, hands-on code, and resourceful solutions for common problems
• Demonstrates how to integrate Reporting Services with SharePoint, configure and use Power View, and manage a native mode report server
   

Table of Contents:

PART I: GETTING STARTED

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCING REPORTING SERVICES 3

CHAPTER 2: REPORTING SERVICES INSTALLATION AND ARCHITECTURE 23

CHAPTER 3: CONFIGURING SHAREPOINT INTEGRATION 69

PART II: REPORT DESIGN

CHAPTER 4: BASIC REPORT DESIGN 95

CHAPTER 5: REPORT LAYOUT AND FORMATTING 123

CHAPTER 6: DESIGNING DATA ACCESS 143

CHAPTER 7: ADVANCED REPORT DESIGN 189

CHAPTER 8: CHART REPORTS 229

PART III: BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE REPORTING

CHAPTER 9: BI SEMANTIC MODELS 251

CHAPTER 10: REPORTING WITH ANALYSIS SERVICES 263

CHAPTER 11: OLAP REPORTING ADVANCED TECHNIQUES 295

PART IV: ENABLING USER REPORTING

CHAPTER 12: TABULAR MODELS 349

CHAPTER 13: VISUAL ANALYTICS WITH POWER VIEW 373

CHAPTER 14: REPORT BUILDER SOLUTION STRATEGIES 445

PART V: SOLUTION PATTERNS

CHAPTER 15: MANAGING REPORT PROJECTS 463

CHAPTER 16: REPORT SOLUTIONS, PATTERNS, AND RECIPES 483

PART VI: ADMINISTERING REPORTING SERVICES

CHAPTER 17: CONTENT MANAGEMENT 525

CHAPTER 18: INTEGRATING REPORTS WITH SHAREPOINT 559

CHAPTER 19: NATIVE MODE SERVER ADMINISTRATION 581

PART VII: REPORTING SERVICES CUSTOM PROGRAMMING

CHAPTER 20: INTEGRATING REPORTS INTO CUSTOM APPLICATIONS 619

CHAPTER 21: USING EMBEDDED AND REFERENCED CODE 681

CHAPTER 22: EXTENDING REPORTING SERVICES 697

PART VIII: APPENDIXES

APPENDIX A: T-SQL COMMAND SYNTAX REFERENCE 758

APPENDIX B: T-SQL SYSTEM VARIABLES AND FUNCTIONS 779

APPENDIX C: MDX REFERENCE 803

INDEX 829

Enjoy!

This post summarizes much of the new functionality in Power View with RC0.

Related information: TechNet page and TechNet wiki for Power View.

Multiple Views in a Single Report

You asked for it, and we are delivering it!  Power View reports now support multiple views per report.  The report pictured below contains a total of five views that you can see previews of to the left of the canvas.

Export to Microsoft PowerPoint

Along with the ability to create reports with multiple views, you can also export your report to PowerPoint.  These are not just static images.   Power View reports inside PowerPoint are fully interactive.

PowerPivot Gallery Preview Images

Power View now produces preview images in the PowerPivot Gallery, just like Excel workbooks.  They are supported in all views of the PowerPivot Gallery (gallery, theater and carousel).

 
In addition, now that Power View reports support multiple views in a single report, when you click on a specific view of the report, Power View will launch with that view as the active view.

Multiple View Navigation

When you are presenting reports with multiple views in them, there is way to navigate the views in a report called storyboard.  Just hover to preview any of the views and select the one you want to display.

Sorting

We are certain you saw this one coming, but Power View now supports sorting on all data regions.  On tables and matrices, all you have to do is click on the column headers to sort.  For charts, there is an area above the chart that we call the “floatie” that allows you to choose to sort the chart by a measure or its categories.

For charts that are displayed as multiples, you can sort those too.  For multiples, sorting sorts the charts themselves by a subtotal, and of course, it’s just a click away via the floatie as well.

More Chart Features

Power View has added more functionality to charts.  In particular, charts now support
•    more than 20 series,
•    multiple measures,
•    and color (series) in scatter and bubble charts.
The chart below shows multiple measures in action, depicting the average win percentage of major league baseball both at home and on the road over a set of years.
 
In the next chart, you can see colors assigned on the scatterplot. 
 
Of course, the feature works with legend highlighting as well.  Select a market size from the legend and all of the points associated with that entry will be highlighted in the chart.
 

Chart Highlighting Enhancements

There is also significant change to the highlighting feature with charts.  When your column and bar charts contain non additive data, Power View will now display the highlighted values with a thinner column that is overlaid on top of the previous values.  This is done to make it possible to see the previous values, regardless of the highlighted values.
It also makes it possible to see cases where the selected item from another visual has no representation in the chart.  For example, in the chart below, not only can we see how Expressjet compares against the average of all carriers for flights delayed by carrier, but we also can see that Expressjet did not operate any routes greater than 1,500 miles.
 

Number Formatting for Tables and Matrix

Power View now supports number formatting on both tables and matrix. 
 

Slicers Cross Filter Other Slicers

When you have multiple slicers on a view now, if you select an entry in one slicer, the other slicers in the view are filtered by it.

Per Data Region Filtering

Filtering improvements are available in RC0.  Power View now supports filters on each data region.  The picture below shows the chart region filter selected in the filter pane.  If you want to switch to filtering the entire view, just hover over the grey “view” text and select it and you’ll be on your way to filtering the entire view.
 

Measure Filters and Filter Restatement

There are two other new features in the filter pane depicted above as well.  The filter pane now supports measure filters and will also restate your filters even when a specific filter is in its collapsed state.
 

Search in Filters

But we’re not done yet.  Have a long list of categories that you don’t want to wade through, use the search feature. 
 

Drag Your Data to the Canvas

You can now drag fields directly to the canvas from the model explorer.  If you hover the field over the canvas, it will create a new table.  If you hover the field over an existing visualization, it will add that field to the next logical location in the visualization.

Print it!

You can now print your current view.  Print is “what you see is what you get”.

Support for DirectQuery mode

DirectQuery mode for Analysis Services tabular models allows you to keep your data in a SQL Server relational database and still get the benefits of interactive reporting with Power View.  You can read all about direct query mode here.

Database Image Support

Power View now supports database images stored directly in the model. 
 

Show Items with No Data

Often referred to as “outer join”, Power View now supports the ability to display items with no data.   The table below shows this feature in action.
 
And just like everything else in Power View, this feature is just a click away in the field well.
 

Measures as Non-Measures

PowerView also supports the ability to treat measures as non-measures (i.e. as categories). To do this, you just go to the field well and choose the option on the field to “Do Not Summarize” as shown below.
 
Below is an example of a report showing the count of airline flights by minutes late. Minutes late is a measure in the table on the left. The table on the right is the same table with the “Do Not Summarize” feature turned on.
 

All New Canvas Look

We’ve changed the overall look of the canvas and many of the items that you can place on the canvas.   Here are a couple of examples of the new look in action.
 
 

SQL Server “Denali” CTP3 is now available for download: https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/pd/SQLDCTP3CTA/ 

The feature pack for SQL Server “Denali” CTP3 is available as well: https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26726

What’s new in Reporting Services in Denali CTP3?

Project “Crescent”

Project Crescent is about interactively visualizing data, quickly gaining analytical insights, and generally having fun with data!

Crescent is Reporting Services’ new reporting tool targeted at data consumers to visually explore their data, answer ad-hoc questions with ease, and to present and collaborate with others in a SharePoint environment. Crescent is a thin browser experience and is working against a BI Semantic Model. BI Semantic Model is available on the client through the Excel-based Power Pivot modeling tool, or on the server through Analysis Services Tabular project with Denali CTP3.

You can find a Project Crescent Overview on Technet. Furthermore, you can watch these session recordings from the recent Tech Ed conference:

• Abundantly “Crescent”: Demos Galore – lots of demos and deeper dive.
• BI Power Hour, which is always fun with demos of the latest technology. You can see Crescent shown starting at 52:50 in the video; as in previous years, my colleague Chris Hays and I had a lot of fun putting together the Crescent demo for BI Power Hour at TechEd, and Carolyn Chau did a great job on stage presenting. More details about how you can create visuals like this yourself in a future blog post.

Crescent was also shown in today’s keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference. 

Self Service Alerting

Alerting is a new capability that we are adding to Reporting Services as well. It enables an end-user to setup alert rules and be alerted when report data changes occur that match a set of rules. No changes are required to the existing reports – you can create alerts for any reports created in previous versions of Reporting Services, as soon as upgrade/move to SQL Server Denali in SharePoint integrated mode.

SharePoint Shared Service

Reporting Services in SharePoint now runs as a SharePoint shared service. Among other benefits, this provides integration with claims authentication and scaling and load-balancing across the SharePoint farm. Furthermore, report viewing performance in SharePoint has been enhanced significantly.

Excel rendering as XLSX, Word rendering as DOCX

These new renderers produce now Open XML Office format and take advantage of some of the new capabilities in Office 2007 and 2010, such as export up to a 1 million rows in Excel. The original renderers for DOC and XLS, which produce binary formats for older Office versions are still available but hidden by default.

BI Development Studio integrated in Visual Studio 2010

Not only did we adopt the Visual Studio 2010 shell for BI Development Studio for report design, but we also rearchitected our integration with Visual Studio in general for RDLC designer and report viewer controls. This will be available with the upcoming next version of Visual Studio and enable much more simultaneous availability of SQL Server Reporting Services functionality in Visual Studio as well.

For discussions on Reporting Services in Denali, please visit and post on our Reporting Services forums:

• https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqldenreportingservices/threads
• https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqlreportingservices/threads

Enjoy!

Ever since Reporting Services 2008 R2, we have been very busy working on Project Crescent, among other projects such as SQL Azure Reporting. Crescent is an exciting project and it was great revealing it publicly for the first time at today’s PASS conference keynote.

In short, Crescent is about having fun with data and gaining analytical insights! It is about visualizing and interacting with modeled data in an engaging and meaningful way using highly interactive visualizations, animations and smart querying, and present and share insights with others in the organization. You can find some more details on the Reporting Services team blog in A Glimpse at Project Crescent.

SQL Azure Reporting enables developers to embed operational reports on information stored in a SQL Azure database, using ReportViewer in remote mode in your applications, with the cloud at your service, and no need to manage or maintain your own reporting infrastructure. 

SQL Azure Reporting provides many of the features you know from SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2 to create your reports with tablices, charts, maps, gauges, sparklines, and more using the familiar Business Intelligence Studio, and deploy them on-premise or in the cloud.  Literally take your report anywhere, and scale when and how you need it.  Check out the webpage for more info, and sign up for the CTP.

You can get more details in this PDC video.

Enjoy!

Report servers with SP2 can integrate with SharePoint 2010 products. SP2 also provides a new add-in for integrating with SharePoint 2007 products. In addition, the new add-in supports the integration of SharePoint 2007 products with SQL Server 2008 R2 report servers.

Summary of updates with SP2:

More information on what's new in Reporting Services 2008 SP2.

Download links:

• Download Report Builder 2.0 with SP2
• Download SQL Server 2008 SP2
• Download SQL Server 2008 SP2 Express
• Download SQL Server 2008 SP2 Feature Packs

In past years, Reporting Services made a number of successful contributions to these events, such as Sea Battle / Battleship, Hangman, report manager as report, etch-a-sketch, mastermind, an executive dashboard (aka tic-tac-toe), and others.  At Tech Ed 2009 and SQL PASS 2009, Thierry D’hers and I showed a new BI Power Hour report demo that we shall call “Sales Strategy” – you can watch a video here.

The goal of the game is to strategically move your sales force to new regions to expand your market share, while keeping a small base staff in your existing regions to maintain sales. As in real life however, your competition doesn’t sleep and will react to your moves – so really managing risk is the name of the game! The competition in the game is implemented as artificial intelligence – although a fairly basic algorithm, it is actually quite difficult to win against it in less than six minutes, and there is considerable risk that you lose eventually after a long battle with decreasing sales force and diminishing market share …

Due to popular request, I’m posting the details of my implementation of the RS Power Hour 2009 turn-based game I built with a little help by my colleagues Chris Hays and Brian Hartman.  In a separate upcoming posting I will explain how to implement double buffering for report viewer to achieve completely seamless report interactivity similar to what you get when playing the game in Report Builder 3.0 (e.g. no visible refresh when the map click/drillthrough is happening).

The report makes use of several new features in RS 2008 R2, such as Map visualizations.  In this blog posting, I want to provide the sources as well as call out several aspects of the report design in more detail.

Automatically Refreshing Report Contents
This feature existed since the first version of Reporting Services, although it seems it is not that widely known.  Under Report, there is a AutoRefresh property which specifies the automatic report refresh interval, i.e. the report automatically reruns with identical report parameter values.  In RS 2008 R2 we enabled expression-based dynamic auto refresh.  If the expression evaluates to 0, the report doesn’t refresh.  If the expression result is greater than 0, the report refreshes. 
This can be useful in business reports to dynamically adjust the report refresh rate. For example, refresh a report every 10 seconds during peak hours, while refreshing only every five minutes (300 seconds) the rest of the time.

In the particular Sales Strategy demo report, the AutoRefresh property is utilized to enable turn-based gaming.  Basically, the game report has two alternating phases at runtime:

• In the first phase, you select a region and then an adjacent region to move sales people (this is implemented as drillthroughs to the report itself).  Expanding to additional regions spreads your sales force thin, at which point you want to hire new staff by clicking the Hire New Staff button (which is again a drillthrough to the report itself).
  
   
• The second phase is triggered by hiring new staff.  The competition moves on a AutoRefresh cycle so that each sales force adjustment by the competition is visualized in the map step-by-step, until the artificial intelligence determines no further moves are possible or the risk is too high, at which point the AutoRefresh cycle goes back to 0 (the report doesn’t automatically update), and the report is back in the first phase. 
  

Dynamic Drillthrough on Map Regions
Similar to dynamic drillthrough on chart data points (explained here), we also enabled this capability on Map Layers.  The screenshots below show that by clicking on the map on the Report Builder design surface, the Map Layers menu opens, which provides access to the Polygon Properties dialog.  The Polygon properties are used for setting up:

• dynamic drillthrough on map regions, e.g. if a particular region is selected, only directly adjacent regions are enabled for drillthrough
• dynamic region fill colors, e.g. if the game is in the second phase of the competition moving, then a vertically striped fill pattern with plum color is applied to visualize the region from which the competition moved sales people from, with a solid fill pattern for the target region.

Artificial Intelligence (Risk Strategy)
While the turn-based state machine aspect has been implemented as custom code inside the report, the artificial intelligence for the strategy of the opponent is implemented in stored procedures inside the database used by the report.

Enough said.  I know you want to participate in the fun and play yourself! 

Instructions to setup the demo on your own RS 2008 R2 report server:

1. Unzip the attachment
2. Restore the database backup (US.bak) on a SQL Server 2008 R2 database server
3. Publish the report (US Sales Strategy.rdl) to your RS 2008 R2 report server (note: a report server is required at this point)
4. After publishing the report, set stored credentials on the data source of the report
   I strongly recommend using stored credentials.  That way, only the stored user needs access to the US database and you won’t run into any potential integrated security double-hop issues. 
5. Play the game with Report Builder 3.0, by opening the report from the report server in connected mode of Report Builder.
   Note that the dynamic auto refresh requires the report to be run via a report server.
   Btw, you can build a small Winforms application, utilizing the Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 ReportViewer control in remote mode, that provides the same seamless interactivity as shown in Report Builder 3.0 in this case. In an upcoming posting, I will explain how to implement double buffering for the report viewer to achieve completely seamless report interactivity (drillthrough) when selecting a region in the map in this report, and when the competition is reacting to your strategy moves.

Hope you are going to enjoy this RS Power Hour demo!

Q&A and disclaimers:

• Reporting Services was not designed as a gaming platform
  This results in some limitations in the game design.  Furthermore, the demo evolved a little bit over time (shown at multiple conferences) with little bits added here and there – if I were to rebuild the backend database and the report from scratch, it would have a somewhat cleaner design. I may also make use of writable and serializable report variables introduced in RS 2008 R2 RTM.
• Could this be built using a local mode report viewer control?
  No, currently not.  The report makes use of several new RDL 2010 features (Map, expression-based dynamic AutoRefresh), which are available in the recently released RS 2008 R2 version, but weren’t available at the time VS 2010 report viewer was released.

US Sales Strategy Risk.zip

You can now download a technology preview of PivotViewer for Reporting Services and try it out yourself!  PivotViewer is a SharePoint web part that embeds the PivotViewer Silverlight control, based on Pivot, which originated in Microsoft Live Labs. 

My esteemed colleague Cristian Petculescu has been the main person working on the implementation of this project.  I just helped Cristian a bit with rendering parameterized reports directly as PNG images (similar to the approach I described a while back in this blog post), report designs (used in internal & public demos), and several further Reporting Services, SharePoint, and Silverlight configuration details.  PivotViewer was first publicly demonstrated by Amir Netz at this year’s TechEd and BI Conference keynotes. 

Further information:

• Donald Farmer’s demo video showing PivotViewer in action:
  https://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/cc397c17-fe21-4dc0-a408-249dbb3299ae
   
• Installation video by Cristian:
  https://petcu40.blogspot.com/2010/07/pivotviewer-extension-for-reporting.html
   
• Update 7/21: Kasper de Jonge provides a great step-by-step walkthrough of using the PivotViewer extension with his own report.

Enjoy and please provide feedback (in PowerPivot forum or Reporting Services forum)!

Section 4 of that whitepaper specifically explains identity delegation for Reporting Services.  The whitepaper also covers SQL Server Analysis Services, PowerPivot, Performance Point Services, Excel Services, and others.