MS SQL Reporting Services

Google I/O 2008 - (Part 2) - Google API specific

Manish Agrawal — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:36:40 GMT

Extend the Reach of your Google Apps Environment with Google APIs Jackie Bodine, Ryan Boyd (Google) and Ron Hess (Salesforce.com) Google Apps already gives your organization an out-of-the-(virtual...	Spice up Your Web Apps with Google AJAX APIs Mark Lucovsky (Google) Integrating Google Search into a website can be simple using the Google AJAX APIs. Mark will show how a few lines of JavaScript ...


Visualize your Data: Google Visualization API The new Google Visualization API lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualiza...	From Mashups to Mapplets David Day (Google) Mapplets are mini-applications that run within Google Maps, allowing you to add new feature or overlay your data directly onto Google Maps. These applic...


My Maps Editing API Keith Golden (Google) Want to know how to add My Maps features on your own mashup? Come and learn how to use some of basic map creation tools from My Maps features and add to y..

Reporting Options

Manish Agrawal — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 05:09:28 GMT

Athena Pawlowski of Canberra .Net User Group has made an excellent PPT on Reporting Options from .Net Applications.

He has compared Crystal Reports, SQL Reporting Services, Active Report and HTML reports on various parameters.

Good work!!

Reinvention of IIS Report Pack..

Manish Agrawal — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:11:00 GMT

While working on MS SQL Reporting Services, I came accross IIS Report Pack a set of 12 Sample Reports for Reporting Services.

The Microsoft SQL Server Report Pack for Internet Information Services (IIS) is a set of 12 Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services reports that works with a sample database of information extracted from Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) log files.
This database can be populated with your own data using the Log Parser included with the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit.
You can also use the sample reports as templates for designing new reports.

Although the sample reports are really good in UI and concept, but it lacks the scalability to even support a small scale (low traffic) websites logs.
For this, it requires major changes at the DB level as well as in the Report Definition Files.

Since designing of MIS Reports is one of my favorite works, from the time I designed & developed MIS Reports for the India's number one SMS Service ( 8888 of Indiatimes/Times Of India ) which receives around 2 million messages a day..

I decided to make the Report Pack more scalable and usable.

To make the reports scalable enough to handle data of high traffic websites, many changes were required in the report pack which are mentioned as under:
1. Redesigning of Database
     a. Added new tables to store the summary,
     b. Added new Stored Procedures to insert and retrieve data from new tables,
     c. Removed bugs from few already existing Stored Procedures.
2. Redesigning of Report Definition Language (RDL) files,
3. Added new Report for Response Status,
4. Created a Windows Service to execute LogParser command as a schedule task, to parse IIS Logs.

By doing this MSSQL Server Report Pack for IIS got much faster with multifold increase in Report Processing speed:
1. Less Network Traffic, as only the precise summary data gets transfered over the wires (between Database Server and Reporting Server),
2. Less Load on Database Server, as data gets processed one time that too during off-peak hours,
3. No Grouping and Summarizing of Data on the Reports' end, this make displaying of Report a breeze,
4. No need to store high volumes of data parsed from IIS Logs in database table, this further increases the database query processing speed,

I hope someone from Microsoft reads this post ;)