Well, given the break over Christmas I have finally managed to get round to some testing. This has begun with getting PPS SP2 set up on our development environment, running solely on SQL Server 2008 and Windows 2008.
To test it fully I have removed everything from our test environment and started from scratch. Note that to install the latest version of SQL Server 2008, you must have Visual Studio SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 installed. If however, you do not have .NET 3.5 SP1 installed, the installation process will attempt to install it.
To install PerformancePoint you may need to use the SKIPREQCHECK command to ensure it will install. I installed all the planning components to ensure I could test all aspects fully. DO NOT run the configuration of any of these planning components until you have applied SP2.
Now install PPS SP2, ensuring you run all of the installers contained within the executable. Unfortunately the prerequisites check still does not seem to recognize later versions of the SQL components that are required, I had difficulty with ADOMD.NET, which still requires version 9 SP2, and even after installing version 10 from the SQL Server 2008 feature pack, it still didn't work. This is an issue as it is required for two of the main components of PerformancePoint Planning:
- Planning Process Service
- Planning Web Service
I found that the December 2008 SQL Server 2005 Feature Pack did the trick (can be found here), and allowed configuration of all four planning components.
Having installed PPS SP2 however, it still seems as though I can not get PerformancePoint to connect to Analysis Services 2008. The connection information does not fill me with joy, when is specifically mentions Analysis Services 2005.
It is Christmas, so I will do some more investigation and see if I can get past this issue, before the new year. More to come soon.
Recently a colleague of mine needed to access Oracle to build a report but did not have the rights to create a stored procedure, which would be the obvious method of choice. We therefore need to pass parameters from Reporting Services to Oracle using the "Query Type" of text. To do this in SQL Server it is relatively intuitive.
Create a shared Data Source - I have used Adventure Works.
Then add a DataSet:
This query will return all records from the Adventure Works 'people' table, showing the following fields; FirstName, MiddleName, LastName and Email Address. If you wanted to restrict this list using a parameter, all you would need to do is add a parameter to the report.
In this instance I have added a parameter titled "EndsWith", so we can use a WHERE with any character or string to filter by the last characters of the FirstName. I have also added a parameter called "BeginsWith". Now you can edit the DataSet to add the where statement as follows:
SELECT FirstName, MiddleName, LastName, EmailAddress
FROM Person.Contact
WHERE (FirstName LIKE @BeginsWith +'%' + @EndsWith)
Now this will work perfectly with SQL Server, however should you wish to connect to Oracle, you will need to make a few simple, but not obvious, changes. These are as follows:
SELECT FirstName, MiddleName, LastName, EmailAddress
FROM Person.Contact
WHERE (FirstName LIKE :BeginsWith +'%' + :EndsWith)
So in short all you have to do is change the @ sign to a : (colon), easy when you know how, a real pain when you don't!
This report will appear as follows when connected to Oracle, or SQL (as long as there are the same databases).
