I'm right now at Redmond in the Microsoft HQ attending a SQL Server 2008 TPrep. There are a bunch of new things for developers, DBAs and Business Intelligence. One of the biggest changes in the BI space is in Reporting Services. There are a huge bunch of changes that allows you to create much more flexible & richer reports easier and faster. Here are some of them:
- A new Report Designer tool that is aimed at end / office users with a new interface with the Office 2007 Ribbon and other UI changes. This allows non-technical users to quickly create reports without delving into the technical stuff.
- A new data formatting control called the Tablix. This is something that designers the ability to use the best features of both the Table and Matrix controls.
- Better rendering support for Excel and CSV export types
- A new MS Word export rending option
- LOTS of new charting options - including:
- Stepped Line, Range Area, Range Bar/Column, Funnel, Pie Callout, Pyramid, Polar, Error and Radar
- Secondary X- and Y- axes
- WYSIWYG chart design control (think Excel charts)
- Multi Charts
- Scale Breaks
- Great new Gauge controls
- Dependency on IIS has been removed - the service uses HTTP.SYS directly
It's great to see the cool, new stuff in the Reporting Services. I'd have liked a couple of other stuff in it as well.
- An auto-format option for the Tablix would have been nice. After all the ASP.NET GridView has them and so do Word and Excel tables.
- An option to allow alternate row formatting for easier reading of reports
- Ability to deploy/install the new Report Designer as a ClickOnce application from the Report manager site
- The Web service endpoint for Reporting Services still remains as ReportServer2005! That's a little nutty I'd say. The name should have been ReportServer2008. Especially since there is a ReportServer2006 that is meant to connect to servers in SharePoint integrated mode. If backward compatibility was such a big deal it would have been trivial to create the ReportServer2008 endpoint and create a wrapper endpoint called ReportServer2005. Explaining this to clients is gonna feel a little stupid! :)
Tags:
sql server
Categories:
SQL Server