Modern Reporting with SQL Server 2016 and 2017 Reporting Services full day pre-conference session

June 15, 2017 by Paul Turley

I am thrilled to be presenting a full-day preconference session before the PASS Summit, on October 31st. Please join me for a deep tour of the new capabilities and BI platform integrations for SQL Server Reporting Services 2016 & 2017. The session will also review the essential skills and tasks to setup and configure the report server and web portal, report design and modern report solution planning.

Here’s an overview of the session:

The 2016 product release was a big upgrade that, once again, brought SSRS into center stage as a market-leading reporting and dashboard design tool for operational and BI reporting. The big news was that SSRS reports truly run in all modern web browsers and work on mobile devices and all desktops in a new modern web portal. The introduction of Mobile Reports, formerly known as Datazen, gives mobile device users interactive, tactile and actionable dashboard style reporting on all the popular mobile smartphones and tablets. The 2017 product brings even more goodness with the integration of Power BI Report Server, on-premises Power BI report integration in a cloud-free platform. Join Paul for a full-day pre-conference session where you will explore new capabilities and learn to integrate modern reporting into your data platform.

This session covers:

What’s new in Reporting Services 2017 (and 2016)?
Reporting Services and Power BI Report Server Architecture
Parameter improvements
Overview of report solution design general best practices
Integrating and managing Power BI on-premises
Integrating SSRS with the Power BI service
Graphical report design
Visualization choices
Chart visual types and new visual options
Indicators and sparklines
Creating dashboard reports
Advanced and analytic reporting
Advanced design techniques
Conditional visibility & drill-down
Pagination & flow control
Error management
Drill-through navigation
Query design beyond the basics
Reporting with SQL Server and Analysis Services
Using the DAX and MDX query editors
Analytical and Business intelligence reporting
Managing report projects and consolidating reports
Upgrading from prior versions of SSRS
Framing and integrating reports the easy way
Introducing Mobile Reports
Multi-device mobile reporting, business cases & scenarios
Visual control categories & behavior
Mobile reports and parameters
Filtering an navigating mobile reports
Building mobile report solutions
Mobile drillthrough – targeting mobile reports and paginated reports
Content management
Managing the web portal
SSRS and Power BI Report Server administration
Custom branding
Instance caching
Server management and configuration

Register for the PASS Summit and preconference here. Also, look out for a sneak peek of this and many other sessions in the 24 Hours Of PASS which will run continuously through July 19th and 20th. Watch the PASS Learning Channel for announcements.

Power BI Hands-On Workshops in April, 2017

March 2, 2017 by Paul Turley

During the month of April, I will be delivering three full-day Power BI hands-On workshops. Each of these events will be the Friday preceding these SQL Saturday events. Seating is limited and many of these workshops tend to book-up. Follow the links to register.

Huntington Beach, Orange County, CA; March 31
SQL Saturday: April 1

Madison, WI; April 7
SQL Saturday: April 8

Redmond, WA; April 14
SQL Saturday: April 15

The format will be the same for each event. These are intermediate-level workshops. If you’re new to Power BI, just a little self-study should get you ready to optimize your learning experience.

Event Description:

In this Power BI hands-on Workshop, we will quickly review the essentials and learn some advanced techniques to transform, model and analyze business information with Power BI Desktop. Techniques and best practices presented are from several prior workshops and years of field experience. Learn to use self-service and enterprise-scale Power BI capabilities; gain valuable skills to integrate, wrangle, shape and visualize data for analysis.

If you’re just getting started, please pick-up an intro book or use online resources to familiarize yourself with Power BI Desktop so you can take your skills to an intermediate level in the workshop. If you have the basics, be prepared to take your skills to the next level; learn to address data and reporting challenges with advanced design techniques. At the conclusion of the workshop, you will have a complete solution built from real business data, shaped, cleansed & modeled; with a dashboard and interactive report visuals ready for analysis.

Topics & skills include: Power Query/M, modeling and calculations/DAX, standard & custom visuals, R visuals. Data sources: CSV, JSON, SQL Server; query folding, scheduled refresh & DirectQuery.

Attendees should have at least intro-level experience w/Power BI Desktop or Power Pivot. Bring laptop w/latest Power BI Desktop ver. installed (PowerBI.com), 64-bit Windows & 4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended), 2 GB free storage. Power BI subscription recommended, not required.

Analysis Services and Power BI: Time-travel, Space-warping and Teleportation

December 10, 2016 by Paul Turley

As I visit businesses, consulting clients and training classes, to teach data reporting and analytics; there is a recurring conversation. It is one that I have had for eighteen years. The audiences change and the technology implementations are a little different over time, but the essential conversation is still the same.

This happened again last week as I was trying to explain the unique characteristics of Multidimensional and Tabular storage to a client. I’m developing a training course where I needed to explain the concepts once again – and then it hit me! …these unique data storage and analytic technologies do what we dream about in science fiction stories and achieve capabilities we imagine existing in the distant future. Channel surfacing on television this week, I watched an episode of Timeless, a Star Trek rerun and a Star Wars movie – where time-travel, space-warp travel and teleportation were commonplace realities. Although fictional as they were portrayed, I think these concepts are very real in our technology landscape. Please indulge me as I explain.

We live in a Linear world. We reside in a place, work in a place, store and move stuff from place to place. Centuries ago, if man needed to move something (perhaps just himself) to a distant place, he would walk, ride a horse or take a sailboat. In weeks or months, he would arrive in another place. Today, we get in a car, navigate the streets, perhaps highways and Interstates and then arrive in a different place within minutes or hours. For longer trips, we board a large metal tube, sit very close to several complete strangers as we climb up into the sky; some period of time goes by and then we somehow arrive in a distant place along with our stuff. At 35,000 feet where the air is very thin, a jet airplane can travel many times faster; leaving an altitude where certain physical laws restrict speed, only to re-enter that atmosphere after it has arrived. To someone from the distant past, this experience would seem fictional.

Image result for jet climping

image: nasa.gov

On a daily basis, I sit or stand in front of my computer monitors, and see and speak with people in distant places. We have live conversations about the weather in their time zone or hemisphere. Through some strange but now common process, technology converts our speech, images, directions, documents, effort and thoughts into 8-bit network packets and electrons that travel almost instantly through space; leaving the earth for a short period, to be transported and reassembled somewhere else.

Years ago, when I wanted new stuff, I would drive to the store. If they didn’t have what I wanted or if it was too expensive, I would spend the day driving to different stores. Today, I “go” to the store on my computer and the very next day, my stuff arrives on my doorstep. We are continually inventing ways to bend space and teleport things within the changing confines of reality.

Data storage is much like the real world. We store terabytes and petabytes (numbers we can’t even explain) in a small space. But, to navigate through the linear storage structure of relational databases and files, the data might as well be thousands of miles or kilometers apart. In order to perform time-variance and statistical calculations, program code must access a group of records in one location to aggregate them, and then find a related group of records – perhaps millions of rows apart – to perform another aggregation. The query might need to perform this operation dozens, hundreds or thousands of times; before it can calculate the final results. One of the best examples is a time-series calculation where a query must “visit” records for each time period to perform an aggregation. The effort is compounded when the goal is to compare aggregate values and variances for parallel and relative periods (e.g. “one year ago”, “three years ago”, etc.) and then perform forecasting or regressions.

image: ctdn.com

In relational storage, the query engine must “drive” from place to place, navigating the streets (file groups, files, pages and rows) to find the records. In an analytic structure (like an Analysis Services cube, or SSAS Tabular model or Power Pivot/Power BI in-memory model), the query engine performs a calculation operation and then teleports to a new location to find a different group of related records.

image: space.com

In a multidimensional cube, the storage processing code quite literally folds space to create the cube structure and pre-calculate some of the aggregate values. Rather than leaving all the data in a linear table, it actually moves data segments close together, reshaping the data structure (thus, the term “cube”). This approach required a great deal of complexity in both the software and the resulting data structure. Advances in computer hardware and software techniques helped simplify the approach. The in-memory tabular model exists in linear, yet fragments of compressed space – where the actual distance between adjacent records is much closer than it appears to be. When the query process is done looking up a group of records it warps to the next group of related records using a memory address. Instead of traveling through space, it steps out of it, like the jet airplane leaving the atmosphere, to re-enter in a different location. It takes much less time to run queries because it is not moving through all the rows of linear tables.

Image result for VertiPaq Compression

image: microsoftpressstore.com, Ferrari, Russo

By using unique and innovative data storage methods (to reduce storage space and access data faster without moving through data), we can, in effect; perform time-travel, warp space and teleportation.

Migrating reports between SSRS report servers simplified with new PowerShell commands

December 3, 2016 by Paul Turley

I recently needed to replicate all of the reports on one report server to a different server. I started downloading each report one at a time to a file system folder, moving them to the other machine and then uploading each RDL file. Needless to say, that’s a slow and painful process. Since a new set of PowerShell command lets (Cmdets) were introduced for Reporting Service just a couple of weeks ago, I decided to give them a try and share the results.

Aaron Nelson, long-time Microsoft Data Platform MVP and PowerShell fanatic, has literally been hounding me for the past few weeks to take some time and look at a new PowerShell library and scripts originally developed by Parth Shah from the SSRS product team. Jaime Tarquino also played a big role in automating the build process. It’s the personal commitment of folks at Microsoft like Parth and Jaime that really make a product like SSRS shine.

Aaron can be pretty persistent and I admit it’s ironic that I’ve been too busy finishing up the final editing work on the Wrox SSRS 2016 book and the new edX SSRS course to look at these RS PowerShell CmdLets but I’m glad that I did because they’re an absolute gold mine.

Back in July Aaron asked me to post some questions about what PowerShell support members of the Reporting Services community would like to see. That post is here. We got some good feedback to help the product team prioritize their efforts in this area. Aaron and and Chrissy LeMaire worked closely with the Reporting Services team to improve the commands before they were recently announced, and the team cited their help in this announcement: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlrsteamblog/2016/11/07/community-contributions-to-the-powershell-scripts-for-reporting-services/

Back to my project… I have developed several demo and lab exercise reports for the new edX SSRS course: Analyzing and Visualizing Data with SQL Server Reporting Services. The development environment is an Azure virtual machine that I recently didn’t have access to while travelling and needed to move all the reports to a local VM to continue my work. I needed to make sure that current versions of these dozens of reports are on both servers. Using a couple of new PowerShell commands, this was quite easy. Here’s how it worked:

Step 1: I open the PowerShell ISE console on the server where I need to archive the reports (shown with the script I’ll run in the next few steps)

Step 2: run a command to download and install the rstools library (see line 1):

Invoke-Expression (Invoke-WebRequest https://aka.ms/rstools)

Step 3: Line 5 downloads all the reports in the “DAT214x Course” folder on my Azure VM report server to a local file system folder:

Out-RsFolderContent …

Step 4: On the destination server, I also run the command to install the rstools library…

Step 5: After copying the files to a local folder (or you could use a UNC path to access a shared folder), run Write-RsFolderContent to upload all the reports to the same destination folder:

Progress is displayed while the files are uploaded:

With shared data sources in the same places, all of the files are uploaded and working:

This saved me hours of time and provided peace of mind, knowing that I could easily automate large migrations in the future.

Here is the complete list of commands. You can get help, execution details and optional parameter information by prefixing the command with the word “help “:

Backup-RsEncryptionKey
Get-RsCatalogItems
Get-RsDataSource
Get-RsItemReferences
Grant-AccessOnCatalogItem
Grant-AccessToRs
New-RsConfigurationSettingObject
New-RsDataSource
New-RsWebServiceProxy
Out-RsCatalogItem
Out-RsFolderContent
Register-PowerBI
Remove-RsCatalogItem
Restore-RSEncryptionKey
Revoke-AccessOnCatalogItem
Revoke-AccessToRs
Set-RsDataSet
Set-RsDataSource
Set-RsDataSourcePassword
Set-RsEmailSettingsAsBasicAuth
Set-RsEmailSettingsAsNoAuth
Set-RsEmailSettingsAsNTLMAuth
Set-RsSharedDataSource
Write-RsCatalogItem
Write-RsFolderContent

Some additional notes (from Aaron)…

You can download these commands into your PowerShell environment very easily by running this simple command:

Invoke-Expression (Invoke-WebRequest https://aka.ms/rstools)

You need to be running PowerShell as Administrator in order to do this.

My favorite command among them is this one which will upload an entire folder worth of Reports & Datasets to an SSRS server for you. Here’s an example using Jamie Thomson’s SSIS Reporting Pack (attached):

Write-RsFolderContent -ReportServerUri ‘http://localhost/ReportServer_SQL2016’ -Path ‘C:\SSIS Reporting Pack\Reports’ -Destination /SSISReporting

You can get the full list of commands by running this:

Get-Command -Module ReportingServicesTools

If you have access to multiple report servers, you only need to run PowerShell commands on one machine.

Folder recursion is supported if you have nested folders.

I think you’ll find these commands can help speed up your Development Lifecycle.

Thanks again to Parth, Jaime, Aaron, Chrissy, Riccardo and the rest of the product team for making this possible!

Power BI On Premises Integration with Reporting Services Preview

November 18, 2016 by Paul Turley

Since the Reporting Services product team announced last year that it was their intention to provide an on premises deployment option for Power BI reports, there has been tremendous interest. Despite their determination to provide clarity around their efforts , there has still been some speculation about how and when we’ll see this capability. I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon and add to the rumors or debate the details. The fact is that product leadership have been more than forthright about their progress and must work through the usual rigor of packaging and supporting a major feature addition when it is ready for release.

At the PASS Summit in Seattle a few weeks ago, Riccardo Muti and Chris Finlan announced that the team planned to release a new preview of the enhancements to SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services that could support Power BI reports hosted within the SSRS web portal. Today, they are delivering the goods with an Azure virtual machine that we can use to preview these features. Riccardo was very clear that the VM would be a very early preview and that the actual released product wouldn’t be announced until it was ready. The question on the minds of several community leaders is whether these features will be available in some kind of update for SQL Server 2016 or whether it will be in the next version of SQL Server. I checked with Riccardo Muti, Group Program Manager for SSRS and he says “We’re releasing Power BI reports in ‘SSRS vNext’ as part of the SQL Server vNext wave, but don’t assume ‘vNext’ must mean a couple of years.“ …and, “it’ll be here in 2017“. Now we have a definitive answer.

Dan English posted about this today in an article titled On-Premise Power BI–A Microsoft Story. I encourage you to read his entire post and understand his thoughts on the matter. At the PASS Summit session, I had the impression that there would be an interim update for SQL Server 2016 but after reading a lengthy email thread today, that doesn’t seem to be the case. My conclusion is that plans can change and there has not been on official announcement on the release plan.

The official announcement was posted today on the Reporting Services product team blog by Chris Finlan, titled Technical Preview of Power BI reports in SQL Server Reporting Services now available. Chris told me about this plan a few weeks head of the announcement and said that they weighed their options carefully before they decided to go down this route. The trade-off was that this decision would likely raise unanswered questions and speculation out in the community. In the end, they decided it was best to err on the side of being open and transparent with their customers.

From Chris’ post on the team blog:

As we brainstormed creative ways to let people try this functionality as early as possible, we had three very specific goals we wanted to achieve:

Provide access to the new functionality publicly as early as possible while ensuring the end-user experience was something you’d find valuable

Create a self-contained experience and environment that allowed users of any skill level an easy way to get started

In no way disrupt or delay the initial preview of a downloadable and installable version

By using the Azure Marketplace to distribute this early technical preview, we feel we have not only met those goals, but also established a repeatable way to distribute content in the future. For users who would prefer to run this technical preview on an on-premises server, you are welcome to provision a virtual machine and then download the image as a .vhd file and use Hyper-V functionality to do so.

Read the entire post for more details and to learn how to obtain the preview.

SSRS 2016 Book Nearly Done… My Brain is now Jell-O

July 19, 2016 by Paul Turley

(first excerpt from the upcoming book)

“Professional SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services and Mobile Reports” from Wrox Press is content complete! The book is well into the editing stage– still, another grueling phase of the publishing process, but there is light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. What is it like to write an 800+ page technical book? I’ve been trying to come up with the best metaphor to describe a year of persistent weekend-and-evening content development – building labs, demonstrations and exercises; performing research and and hounding my friends on the product team. A big thanks thanks to Chris Finlan, Riccardo Muti and Robert Bruckner on the SSRS product team for their continued help and support.

I’ve admittedly been a bit quiet on the community front for a while I’ve been heads-down on this book project but I hope to start redirecting more energy to community content.

Intense book writing can be a life-sucker:

Image result for pricess bride torture

This is Paul’s brain…
…this is Paul’s brain after writing a technical book:

Image result for brain jello

Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy book writing. I’ve spent a lot of my career writing technical books and courseware because I enjoy the challenge. Writing helps me see things from different perspectives and at different levels of depth and difficulty for different audiences.

Give my brain a couple of weeks to heal and I’ll channel some of that energy into blogging and producing more community-facing training content.

So, what’s in the book? This is the Fifth Edition of the Wrox Professional SQL Server Reporting Services series which I’ve been leading and co-authoring since 2003. Amazon still has a working title listed but this is normal. As a next-edition, some of the 2012 edition evolved forward but most of the book is all new material. Four chapters are dedicated to the new Mobile Report features introduced in SSRS 2016. Before someone asks… when will the book be out? I don’t know exactly; there’s still work to be done. Soon. How’s that?

Over the next few weeks, I’ll post excerpts from the book to give you a taste of what’s coming and provide some valuable information about SSRS 2016.

Here’s a short except from Chapter 2:
What’s New in SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services?

Reporting Services was released as an add-in tool for SQL Server 2000 back in early 2004. At the time, the feature set was light by comparison to the product today but the foundational architecture was hasn’t changed significantly. Essential features included basic charts, sub-reports data regions and single-value textboxes.

The second release in 2005 added a self-service report authoring tool called Report Builder (later named Report Builder 1.0) paired with a semantic modelling tool in the designer. The original modelling and ad hoc report tool has since been deprecated but it inspired more capable replacement technologies like Power Pivot and the later generations of Report Builder. Not to be confused with the original Report Builder tool, Report Builder 2.0 and 3.0 produce report definition files compatible with the report project tools that are integrated with Visual Studio; originally called Business Intelligence Development Studio (or “BIDS”).

Report Builder and Designer Enhancements

The report design experience for standard “paginated” reports hasn’t really changed much over the past few product versions but there have been incremental improvements. Report Builder is restyled to conform to Office 2016 standards. The installation process for Report Builder changes to an “Evergreen” app. This means that Microsoft maintains updates for frequent download, rather than the old “ClickOnce” installation from your on-prem server. Similar to prior versions, users can elect to install Report Builder from the Report Portal menu. Report Builder is updated with a modern look-and-feel, simple and sleek, Changes are mostly cosmetic while the fundamental features are the same.

The Visual Studio integrated Report Designer is now part of SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), a downloadable add-in for Visual Studio. Although the tool set hasn’t changed significantly, there are some subtle changes to the way SSDT is installed and the way updates are delivered. First of all, confusion about the name “SSDT” is dispelled because the former “SSDT” (the previous version add-in for database projects) and “SSDT for BI” (the previous version add-in for SSIS, SSAS and SSRS projects) are now a combined package, simply called SSDT. Secondly, you can simply download and install a version of SSDT that will work with the current version of Visual Studio or a few versions back. The SSDT add-in will be updated frequently and you will have the option to install updates on-demand from within Visual Studio.

Modern Browser Rendering

One of the most significant product improvements in 2016 may be one of the least apparent under casual observation. The entire HTML rendering engine has been completely overhauled across the platform. The report portal, used to navigate and manage report content, and the actual report content are rendered to modern HTML 5 standards, which are supported by all modern web browsers. The shift to modern HTML output means that web content produced by Reporting Services is consistently consumable on any device, regardless of the operating system or web browser, so long as it supports modern standards. The benefits are readily apparent when reports simply work on smartphones of any type, on tablets and laptop and desktop machines; regardless of the brand or operating system.

Parameter Layout Control

You will have improved control over parameter formatting and placement. Since the inception of Reporting Services about twelve years ago, parameters have always been arbitrarily arranged in a narrow bar at the top of the browser window, from left-to-right, and then top-down. The report designer has a grid to manage the placement of parameters, in the parameter bar, in any configuration, within definable rows and columns.

Mobile Reports

The addition of mobile dashboards to the SSRS platform is based on the Datazen product acquisition from ComponentArt in 2015. Mobile reports are primarily designed to enable data interactivity in dashboard-style reports created by a mobile report developer. Managing this expectation is important because this tool is significantly different than conventional Reporting Services.

Mobile reports can be viewed in the browser but are optimized for phone and tablet devices through native, installed applications running on all the major mobile OS platforms. They are not a replacement for high-fidelity paginated reports created with Reporting Services, or self-service analytics in Power BI; they serve an entirely different purpose.

At first, the mobile dashboard experience may seem to be a simple drop-in of the Datazen product; but, it is apparent that some integration with the SSRS architecture has already taken place, and more adaptations are likely on the horizon. The first notable difference is the Datazen server is entirely replaced by the SQL Server report server, and queries are now managed as SSRS shared datasets.

KPIs

New Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) integrated with the new Report Portal are also based on the Datazen product acquisition. These KPI visuals are created and managed entirely within the portal. In additional to the standard traffic light style comparison of actual vs target values, KPIs can include a trend line or segment chart. The KPI is driven by data from one or more shared datasets that were created in the SSDT report designer. For ease and simplicity, any value of the KPI can be entered manually through the design page.

Although they are visualized in the Report Portal, KPIs are delivered to mobile devices through the Power BI mobile applications on every popular device platform.

Native Printing Control

The previous printing capability in SSRS replied on an ActiveX control which was only supported on Windows desktops and in certain web browsers. Even in tightly controlled Windows server environments, system administrators would rescind ActiveX support and disallow report printing from the server. The modern printing solution uses the PDF renderer to printable output and then the Adobe document viewer to perform the actual printing

PowerPoint Rendering

Users have had the option to export and render report content to Excel for several SSRS versions. Output to Word was added in SQL Server 2008 and then both of these rendering options were improved and updated in the 2008 R2 version. Now a third Office application format will be supported with the introduction of PowerPoint document rendering.

Most report items and data regions are converted to individual image objects in the resulting PowerPoint sides with one side generated per report page. Additional slides are created based on the report content size and layout. Textboxes are created for titles and report text, which support some report actions and textbox properties.

Integrated and Improved Report Portal

A new Report Portal web interface is introduced to replace the Report Manager. Like Report Manager, the portal is an ASP.NET web application used to access, run and manage reports in the web browser. The new portal has a look-and-feel we are accustomed to seeing in other modern apps from Microsoft these days; with responsive design for constancy on different device form factors. Report Portal will be the home for mobile reports, KPIs and paginated reports – the new name for RDL reports authored with Reporting Services. In the future, we may see support for additional content types.

Report Portal supports in all modern web browser by emitting responsive HTML5 with adaptations for mobile devices and screen orientations.

New Charts and Visual Enhancements

With the addition of two new chart types, visualization improvements are inched forward in Reporting Services. The new Sunburst and Treemap charts apply multi-level field groups visualized in both color and visual boundaries.

New and updated report visuals are likely to be an area of focus for future Reporting Services enhancements, given the success of self-service BI tools like Power BI. The design interface is identical to existing chart types and the only real difference is that groups of rows are visualized in these unique formats. The Sunburst chart is also capable of consuming unbalanced hierarchies with slices generated for different levels only where data points exist.

Standardized, Modern Browser Rendering

At first, you may not notice significant changes from previous versions, but the HTML renderer has been completely overhauled and updated. Now, reports are rendered to HTML 5 standards whereas, they should consistently maintain the same appearance and behavior in all modern browsers that support the HTML 5 standard such as Microsoft Edge, IE 11, and newer versions of Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox. This change is a welcome improvement which should clear up many problems with inconsistent and quirky report layouts while using different web browsers and devices. By the same token, the change means there is no specific backward-compatibility for outdated browsers; consequently, reports that may have worked (or partially worked) in an old version of Internet Explorer may no longer work until the user upgrades.

Power BI Dashboard Pinning

For organizations who have invested in the Power BI cloud service, the Power BI integration feature allows users to pin graphical SSRS report visuals to their online dashboards. In order to use this feature, an administrator must register the report server with an existing Power BI subscription, and a report user must have access to the Power BI subscription.

Reporting Services Configuration Manager includes a new page to manage Power BI Integration. This is where you register the report server instance with the Power BI subscription. When a report with “pinnable” items (such as images, charts and gauges) is viewed in Report Portal, the Power BI icon is displayed on the toolbar.

“pinnable” items are highlighted in Report Portal. When a visual is selected, you are prompted to select a Power BI dashboard and the refresh frequency. This schedules an Agent job on the report server to push updated visuals to the dashboard at the selected frequency.

The Select frequency of updates option utilizes the SSRS subscription architecture by scheduling a SQL Server Agent job on the database server with the report server catalog. The Agent job re-queries the report data and then a report server component refreshes the Power BI dashboard tile with an updated report visual.

Pinned report visuals appear on the dashboard alongside the Power BI report and Excel visuals. Clicking on one of these visuals will drill-through to the report back on the on-premises report server. This gives users a seamless navigation experience between cloud-hosted Power BI content and selected report visual elements on your own report server.

The integrated Power BI experience is a big step forward in providing a completely integrated IT-hosted and self-service reporting, BI and analytics solution.

Using Power BI with Enterprise, On-premises Data

June 19, 2016 by Paul Turley

I just finished posting a 4-part series demonstrating how to use Power BI with on-premises data. The running time for all four parts is about 44 minutes. I cover using the Power BI Enterprise Gateway to connect published Power BI reports to on-premises data sources:

SQL Server database connected with DirectQuery
Large SQL Server database with clustered column store index connected with DirectQuery
SSAS multidimensional/cube on-prem with direct connect
SSAS Tabular with large data volume & multiple partitions on-prem with direct connect

The four-part series is on my YouTube channel using the following links:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Adam Saxton also gives a nice walkthrough of using SQL Server DirectQuery with Power BI that may provide an additional perspective and information about securing and sharing the solution.

I’d also like to give a plug for a terrific Power BI architecture diagram poster created by Dustin Ryan. I love the simplicity of this comprehensive graphic. You can download the PDF file from his blog.

Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog

sharing my experiences with thee Microsoft data platform, SQL Server BI, Data Modeling, SSAS Design, Power Pivot, Power BI, SSRS Advanced Design, Power BI, Dashboards & Visualization

Category Archives: MVP Community

Modern Reporting with SQL Server 2016 and 2017 Reporting Services full day pre-conference session

Power BI Hands-On Workshops in April, 2017

Analysis Services and Power BI: Time-travel, Space-warping and Teleportation

Migrating reports between SSRS report servers simplified with new PowerShell commands

Power BI On Premises Integration with Reporting Services Preview

SSRS 2016 Book Nearly Done… My Brain is now Jell-O

Using Power BI with Enterprise, On-premises Data

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