What's New for SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services

Carolyn Chau - Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

Hello and welcome to today's session, What's New for SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services. My
name is Carolyn Chau, and I'm a principal program manager at Microsoft in the BI division, and
today we're going to be taking a look at some of the new features coming with Reporting
Services specifically.



So, the agenda is we'll first have a short recap of Reporting Services 2008 R2, which was the last
release of SQL Server. We'll discuss the SQL Server 2012 pillars, and then we'll look at the key
investment areas for Reporting Services 2012, and then we'll spend a little bit of time looking
ahead beyond 2012.



So, really quickly, in the SQL Server 2008 R2 timeframe we invested very heavily in the corporate
BI scenario. That means that we spent a lot of time developing features that were specific to
corporate BI, especially around things like enabling end users to have a much easier reporting
experience using our Report Builder and other tools.

Some of the investment areas that we focused on, first of all, is the ability to have reusable parts
within our tools. So, as an end user one of the hardest things that we find is for users to be able
to go and get started with reporting. So, one of the things that we've done in SQL Server 2008
R2 is allow users to have reusable report parts. Those report parts can be everything from a
simple shared dataset, which means that you go ahead and create a dataset that your users can
then build visualizations on top of, or you can actually take whole visualizations, a chart, a map,
a gauge, a sparkline, and you can actually save those directly into the report catalogue, and your
users can go in and then search for those and just simply add them to their report. That way
they can combine multiple visualizations together, and just make changes to those visualizations
instead of having to start from scratch in creating all the visualizations, as well as the data.

Report parts, when you add them to the report library, they actually are fully -- have all the
information they need to process, which means that not only do they have and include the
visualization, but also the data sets, the connection information, the parameter information.
That all gets encapsulated into the report part, making it really easy for users to just simply
manipulate and combine them together.

We also added a set of new visualizations to our visualization capability. And some of the
highlights of those are the ability to have mapping capability. So, that's not just geo-spatial.
They don't have to be geographic maps. You can actually map anything that's a spatial type. So,
things like floor plans or locations, things like that.

In addition to maps, we also have gauges and sparklines and data bars and KPI support.

Also, we added the ability to support AJAX to our report viewer. So, those of you who are
familiar with our report viewer capability, this is a control which ships with Visual Studio and
allows you to embed reporting directly into your applications. We've enhanced that with AJAX
support, giving you more control and better performance overall with the report viewer.

We've also completed a number of customer DCRs. These are things that you as our customers
have voted on and surfaced to the top of our list in terms of new capabilities that you
requested, and we fulfilled a bunch of those.

In the process of focusing on these key areas, we did cut a few scenarios for SQL Server 2008 R2
specifically around ad hoc reporting and alerting. And you'll see some of that come back in the
SQL Server 2012 release.



So, moving on to the SQL Server 2012 pillars. These are the main pillars for the release of SQL
Server 2012. And the driver is delivering business agility and innovation to gain strategic value
out of your information.

And along with that, there are three pillars to SQL Server 2012. The first is mission-critical
platform. This is really all about increasing flexibility and having great scalability as well as high
availability with your solution. So, you'll see features like AlwaysOn fall into this category, as
well as data warehousing with parallel data warehouse, really great developments in both scale,
performance, availability.

In the middle pillar, we have developer and IT productivity. This is all about having one great set
of tools for you to build your solutions with and having those be really cost effective, easy to
manage, and help you build those solutions really quickly, get them out into the marketplace.
And those solutions are also encapsulated into one development platform.

We have the BI Development Studio specifically for business intelligence solution development.
That's one set of tools, one familiar environment for you to go in and build your end-to-end BI
solutions.

Finally, on the right-hand side is your pillar for pervasive insight. We're going to be focusing
mostly on this pillar today. Reporting Services as a feature of SQL Server is really focused
around enabling end users to have really great insights with their data. So, this is all about
expanding the reach of BI to, more broadly, the business users in your organization, having
really great breakthrough performance with the new in-memory analytics, and this is all about
PowerPivot and having the VertiPaq engine integrated into the server in the SQL Server 2012
timeframe. And, of course, all of that comes together to help your users deliver really credible
and consistent data.



For SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services, we also have three main pillars and we'll go from right
to left on these. The first pillar is really about increasing efficiency and this is our investment,
our continued investment into SharePoint integration for Reporting Services in the SQL Server
2012 timeframe, Reporting Services is now a shared service of SharePoint, and that means that
we have all the great capabilities of being a native SharePoint service.

Some of those key capabilities are having the built-in, scale-out ability that comes directly with
SharePoint, and having the ability to report cross-farm, and also a really fully integrated
administration and configuration ability directly within SharePoint with integrated backup,
recovery, logging, configuration, PowerShell, and so forth. And I'll show you some of that as we
move along.

In the middle, we have a pillar around increasing productivity and proactive intelligence. The
main capability that we have here is a new end user alerting capability. This is all about defining
alerts within your reports. So, if your end users are going through and they find content, a
report that they're really interested in, and they'd like to be notified when something in that
report changes or crosses some kind of threshold, there's a really new, easy-to-use UI for
creating and defining those alerts. And I'll go ahead and show that to you also.

We also have added the support for the Excel and Word 2007 and 2010 export formats. With
the previous version of Reporting Services, we were still exporting to the 2003 format, and
we've seen a lot of demand for exporting to the new formats.

And, finally, on the left-hand side, we have a pillar around empowering end users. Our solution,
our new offering in this area is the Power View application. This is a new ad hoc reporting tool.
It's a very highly visual design experience driven by a rich metadata layer, which is your BI
semantic model. And it allows you to create and tell stories with your data and present your
data at all times.



Let's go ahead and drill into each of these pillars individually. First of all, we'll talk about the
infrastructure investment with the new SharePoint integrated mode.



This is really a continued investment for Reporting Services. Over the last few releases, you've
seen us integrate into SharePoint and our integration become more and more deeply ingrained
into the SharePoint experience.

For SQL Server 2012, we integrate with SharePoint 2010 as a shared service. And some of those
highlights are the ability to host ourselves inside of SharePoint now using the SharePoint Shared
Service app pool. So, there's not a separate set of security that you need to configure for
managing your SharePoint farm.

Also, the Reporting Services catalog databases are now SharePoint Service application
databases, so we don't create a customer database, we just go ahead and leverage and extend
those SharePoint Service application database capability directly.

As part of this work, we've also added WCF and claims-based communication and
authentication. So, now you can really seamlessly pass your security from SharePoint all the
way through to the back end for Reporting Services using WCF and Claims.

And instead of having WMI as our management and scripting capability, we've now integrated
with PowerShell and use PowerShell commandlets for doing that. All of our UI for managing
Reporting Services integration into SharePoint is now part of SharePoint's central administration
UI, and I'll go ahead and show you some of that in a few minutes.

Also, the logging capabilities are now not separate on the Reporting Services server, they're fully
integrated into SharePoint logging. One of the pain points that we had seen previously was
SharePoint would log its events into its own logs, Reporting Services on the server would log
events separately. And if you were really trying to diagnose a problem end to end, you had to
take two separate log capabilities, match them up, and then figure out what was going on. Now
with a single integrated logging directly in SharePoint, that debugging experience is going to be
much easier for you.

Finally, as a shared service, we can use SharePoint's native scale-out and load balancing
capabilities directly.

In terms of performance, one of the key areas of customer feedback that we heard was that
reports, especially smaller reports, tended to be a little bit slower in SharePoint Integrated
Mode, and we've gone ahead and fixed that and, in fact, now with SQL Server 2008 R2
SharePoint Mode compared to the new SQL Server 2012 SharePoint Mode, we've seen an
increase in performance in the 30-60 percent range. So, we're very excited about that and we
hope that you will find that your SharePoint Integrated Mode reports will run much more
quickly than they did before.

As I previously mentioned, we also made a number of enhancements to our AJAX Report
Viewer. We've added the support for AJAX so that you can get some more dynamic interaction
with the viewer. We've added a number of features that were highly desired and requested by
you, our customers, and we've also increased the performance of that viewer also.

SQL Server also now has a setup option directly for Reporting Services in SharePoint Integrated
Mode. So, as you're going through the setup experience, there will be one place for you to go
ahead and configure and manage your setup through the SQL Server setup capabilities directly.
There's no additional setup step needed after.



So, the summary of the key differences between the SQL Server 2008 R2 experience versus the
SQL Server 2012 experience is we moved from having a Windows shared service for Reporting
Services into the SharePoint shared service itself, so there's not a separate service for Reporting
Services now.

The configuration and manageability capabilities that we used to have in a separate
configuration tool are now moved directly to SharePoint Central Administration. Our
manageability APIs and WMI, as I mentioned previously, have now been moved to the
PowerShell commandlet capability. And then our Report Server URLs and access now go
through a proxy and are exposed as such.



So, let me go ahead and just show you really quickly what some of that management UI looks
like. So, I have a page already open to SharePoint Central Administration, and you can see here
we have a managed service applications link. And when I click on that, you'll now see that there
is an RS application, SQL Server Reporting Services service application, alongside Excel Services
and some of the other applications that run directly as a shared service.

When I click the Reporting Services shared application, you'll see a set of different actions or
activities that I can take. There are some systems settings. I can come in here and now
configure the report server settings for timeouts, for compression, report timeout, session
timeouts, and can enable logging from here. I can specify the type of security that we use,
whether it's integrated or not, and some of the security settings that we have on the server.

And we can also define what kind of client capabilities are exposed in the report server, and
those are just some of the properties that we have.

You can also manage your jobs here. If you've defined jobs or -- I don't have any in this
particular case, but if you've defined scheduled jobs in Reporting Services, those will show up.
You can, of course, back up and monitor and restore and change your keys, thats very
important.

Set the execution account so if you do schedule reports, you can set the execution account here,
configure the e-mail settings, and provision subscriptions and alerts directly here.

The next thing I'm going to go show you is just really quickly the monitoring capabilities. And
we'll see that there's now a configure diagnostics function in SharePoint, which we integrate
into. This is the integrated logging that I mentioned before.

In the categories, you'll now find a SQL Server Reporting Services category. You can enable
logging and there's a whole list of different logging features that you can turn on. You can tell
everything from the number of users, the pages that are viewed, the types of extensions that
people are connecting with, the notifications that are coming, the memory monitoring that
we're doing, the types of clients that are accessing the server, and really have a lot of fine-grain
control over the different types of logging that you can do.

All right. So, that gives you a little bit of an overview of the Reporting Services management
capability directly in SharePoint.

If I come back to Central Admin, you'll also see that there are actually a set of application
settings. And if I come in here, there's a SQL Server Reporting Services setting here. And if
you're using SQL Server 2012, you actually don't need to use this section, just a reminder. These
are if you're connecting this instance of SharePoint and you're going to go against an older
instance of Reporting Services on the server, if you're using SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008
R2, you configure that integration here. But if you're using SQL Server 2012, you want to go
ahead and manage your application directly by going to manage service applications here and
going to the RS application.

So, that gives you a little bit of an overview of the SharePoint integrated experience. So, let's go
ahead and move on to the next section.



The next area that I talked about previously is our investment in operational reporting. And
there are two particular areas that we've invested in here, the first is self-service alerting, and
then also the Office 2007/2010 integration.



With self-service alerting, as I said, the user's looking at a report -- this is an end user who is
consuming a report. They have the ability to now define and create alerts off of those reports.
They pick a particular set of data that they want to alert on, they create the alert, they define
the rules which trigger the alert, and then that will get sent to them via e-mail and they can
manage their own alerts using the alert management capability directly in SharePoint. This is a
SharePoint Integrated Mode functionality, and it comes with SharePoint Integrated Mode.



This new alerting capability is built directly on reports that you've previously created on
Reporting Services using either BIDS or Report Builder. There's nothing that you have to do in
order to enable this alerting capability on your existing reports, you just need to upgrade to the
new version of Reporting Services.

So, if you created a report here, this is probably a Report Builder report, and it's got some tables
and some charts. There's no change to the report itself. This new alerting capability just sits on
top of it when you upgrade.

And as I mentioned previously, it's very easy to do that. It's very end user focused. It's
integrated with SharePoint and it really is developed for the end user to be able to create an
manage their own alerts.



There's a scheduling capability that comes with this alerting, which means that when you create
the rules that trigger the alert, you can also define how often those rules get run. And you can
specify how often it gets run, also specify who gets the alert and some of the description that
comes along with the alert. I'm going to show you all of these inside of the demo in a few
minutes.



When the user receives the alert, it looks sort of like this. They get the body of the alert. They
understand and see what data actually triggered the alert and the rules that triggered the alert.
It's very actionable. They can go back and look at the report directly. It shows the context of
when and how that alert was triggered, and it's really simple and it can go to a single or multiple
recipients. And you can either put in individual e-mail addresses or discussion groups or aliases
here also.



In terms of the workflow, what you can do is also manage these alerts directly within
SharePoint. So, as a user, I can come in and take a look at all the alerts that I've defined on any
report within the site and I can go ahead and manage them in list form, and I'll show you that
also.

As an administrator to the site, I can go ahead and look at all the alerts that have been created
on the site by every user and manage all of those alerts together.



So, for the IT administrator, in order to get this capability, what you need to do is install
Reporting Services in SharePoint Integrated Mode, and you configure the settings that are
stored in the SharePoint database. You can monitor these alerts. You can go ahead and create
and monitor and log the capabilities that are being used through the alerting. You can also
enable tracing and logging through the ULS logs I showed you. There's a new row item for
logging the use of alerting.

And you have performance counters to determine when you need to scale out or when you
need to scale out or when you need to also go ahead and add additional hardware for your
configuration.

The more alerts and more frequently you run the alerts, of course, that will require resources.
So, if you choose, or if your users choose to run alerts every day or every minute, then of course
that's going to require more resources because we're running the reports in order to determine
whether the alerts get triggered and checking that on a frequent basis.



So, let's go ahead and show you Self Service Alerting. I'm here in SharePoint. As I mentioned
before, this capability is directly integrated in SharePoint. And I have this report called Project
Tracking. I'm going to go ahead and run that report. And this is, again, a report that I've created
previously in Report Builder, and it's an existing report that I've had. And this is just a very, very
simple report that shows me people on my team, some of the tasks that they're supposed to do,
the due date on those tasks, the ETA, and then the completed date.

And perhaps as a manager of this team of people, what I really want to do is get notified
whenever one of my directs completes a task behind schedule. So, what I want to do is create
an alert here. And you can see there's this actions tab. And when I go ahead and drop down the
actions tab, there's a new data alert item. And when I click on it, it will bring up UI, which will
allow me to create the alert.

So, here I am. I have this task list. If I had more than one table, if I had multiple charts, the data
behind those which show up in this list, and I could go ahead and pick which set of data I want
to alert on. In this case, I only have one. So, I'll go ahead and just see the data for that
particular one data region.

I can create an alert name. So, I can say this is my project tracking alert. And then I can define
the rules around that alert. So, if I click here, I can say alert me if any data has met these
conditions, or if no data meets these conditions. And this time, I'll choose if any data has, and
add a rule.

And I want a rule based on the due date of the task. And I can say the due date is -- and I can
say is not before or after. I can put in a date directly. I can pick a date from a calendar. I can
drop down and say, well, I'd like to compare the due date to another field. And that's what I'm
going to do in this case.

So, I'm going to say when the due date is -- I'm sorry, when the completed date is after -- and I'll
go ahead and select another field, and I'll say when the due date -- when the completed date is
after the due date. So, I want to know when tasks are late.

I can then go ahead and add another rule. And I can say, well, I'm really concerned about
George or I'm concerned about somebody else. And I can go ahead and say when the person is
George or when the person is Adam or it's in a list of some kind. So, that is the ability to find
more than one rule for an alert. And you can see that all the rules get in together. And so
they'll get run sequentially.

Once I have the rules I want, and I'll just keep it simple and say alert me when the completed
date is after the due date, I can set the schedule for that alert. And the schedule can be every
day, every week, every hour, every minute. If, again, if you set it to be every minute, that's
going to run the report every minute and go ahead and try to compare your rules and see if that
alert's going to get triggered. So, it is resource intensive if you pick some of the more frequent
schedules.

I can also click this advance button and see that I can set the alert to start on some other day if I
don't want it to start today. I can define a timeframe for that alert and stop the alert at some
point.

One of the great things that we added also is the ability to not send a message if the alert hasn't
changed. So, if I keep triggering the alert on the same value, I just want to get alerted once, I
don't want to know if the same value is triggering the alert over and over again. I can say don't
send me a message if the same value is triggering the alert.

Then I can decide who's going to receive that e-mail. In this case, I'm going to send it to my own
account. I can add additional accounts and I can add discussion aliases or security groups here
also.

I can add a subject for the alert. And I can also add a description. So, I can go ahead and type in
my task tracking alert. And I'll go ahead and save that. And that's all I had to do in order to
create an alert. When I go back now and drop down the project tracking report item, I'll see
there's a manage data alert item in the drop-down list of actions that I can take on this report.
And when I click on that, you'll see a list of the alerts on this report.

So, I'm logged in as this account user. I have created an alert on this report. If I had alerts on
multiple reports, they would show up on this list. And this is the new alert that I just created,
the project tracking alert. I can go ahead and run that directly. If I right-click on it, I can edit the
alert, delete it, or I can just go ahead and run it and execute it.

And if I refresh the page in a minute, it'll go ahead and show me that the alert was created and
that now it's been run. So, I ran the alert and the alert ran successfully.

What I've done is actually I don't have a Web server installed -- a mail server installed on this
machine, but I have setup the delivery to actually deliver to my local disk into this little file. And
you can see today is 2/10/2012. And I now have an e-mail message here that shows me that my
alert was triggered when I ran it. It was sent on behalf of this account. And I can see exactly
which rule, or which data in the data set triggered the alert. George was supposed to arrange a
meeting with Contoso, the due date was 2/5, the ETA was 2/5, he put in previously the due date
was 2/10, and it didn't get completed until 2/15. And it looks like all the sales reps were here in
Seattle attending a SQL Server event.

So, I can go directly to the report and take a look at the full set of the data, and I can also see
and read the rules that triggered that alert. It's a very simple end user UI for creating the alerts,
sending the messages around those alerts, and really being able to have a great experience as
an end user to define those.

As the site administrator, I can actually come in now. And if I go to site actions, I can go to sit
settings. And as administrator of this site, I can see there's a Reporting Services section of the
site settings, and I can actually manage the data alerts here. So, if I come in, I'll see that if I had
more users, I would see all of the alerts for all the users as well as all of the alerts for all of the
different reports that I have in my system. And as an administrator, I can go ahead and now
manage all of the alerts on this site.

So, that gives you a little bit of a demo of the alerting capability, and we'll come back and
continue on.



The next investment we're going to talk about is the open XML rendering extensions for Office.
With the SQL Server 2012 release, Reporting Services now supports the Office 2007 export
formats. And that means that when we generate an export, the export will then create either a
.docx for Word or .xlsx for Excel.

And the goal of this functionality really was to make sure that we could generate these formats
but still have feature parity with the existing Word and Excel renderers. So, you shouldn't see
any differences in the look of the report as we've moved to the new format, it should just
upgrade your format and gives you some of the nice capabilities of the new format.

One of the biggest gains that we see from being able to export to the new format is that the
formats are ZIP-compressed files. That means that the export that you get is actually much
smaller than it used to be and that ZIP-compressed file now takes up less space. So, that makes
it much easier for users who are exporting and then emailing those files or putting them
somewhere.

In addition, you get some of the nice native capabilities that come with the new format. In
Excel, one of the biggest benefit that we hear customers want is the move from 65,000 rows to
a million rows in Excel, as well as the 256 columns to the 16,000 columns. So, you can really get
much bigger exports to Excel if you want them.

Also, one of the nice side benefits is we've gone, with the new format, to going from a 56-color
palette to the 24-bit color palette. That means that your Reporting Services reports that you
define will export with much more color fidelity than they used to. So, lots of great benefits to
exporting to the next formats.

The new formats are turned on by default, so when you go to export your report, they will
automatically export to .docx or .xlsx. If you would like to keep your users exporting to the old
formats, you can go to the configuration file for Reporting Services and you can configure the
other exports, the older exports as the default, or re-enable them, if you want.



Finally, let's go ahead and take a look at the self-service BI investment. And this is really all
about thin, ad hoc reporting with our new ad hoc reporting tool called Power View.



What is Power View? This is our vision and mission statement for Power View. It's an
interactive data exploration and visual presentation experience. And those are really the words
that help you understand the experience and the goals of the new ad hoc reporting tool. It is
very highly interactive. You explore your data with the data directly on the canvas all the time.
And it's always ready to be presented. We want you to be able to discover insights into your
data, tell stories with your data, and present your insights.



Some of the key capabilities of Power View are highlighted here. First of all, as I mentioned,
there's a highly visual design experience. It's interactive, it's fully Web-enabled and Web-based.
All a user needs is a Web browser and Silverlight. It's designed after the familiar Microsoft
Office design patterns. So, if your users are used to using Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint,
they'll find Power View very familiar.

There are many new data visualization types that we've added, as well as making those
visualizations much easier to create inside of Power View.

Power View is driven by a rich metadata layer, and that's the BI semantic model. That's also
fully integrated with PowerPivot, so in the SQL Server 2012 timeframe, you can create a BI
semantic model using the PowerPivot add-in directly inside of Excel. So, if you have end users
who want to do their own modeling and match up data from multiple data sources, you can go
ahead and have them install the PowerPivot add-in and create their BI semantic model directly
inside of Excel.

They can then publish that PowerPivot workbook to a SharePoint library and use PowerPivot to
visualize on top of that workbook.

There's also a very powerful querying capability inside of Power View. The user doesn't have to
know anything about querying, writing any queries, or defining any languages. They just
interact with the data directly.

There's no configuration for some of the interactivity and I will show you some of those. It's also
very highly animated and allows you to do trending and comparisons very easily.

Finally, it's presentation ready at all times. This means that there's actually an interactive
presentation mode that you can put the application into, and that's all delivered and allows you
to collaborate directly through SharePoint.



A little bit of overview of some of the UI in Power View. I mentioned it's completely Web based.
It includes a very familiar Microsoft Office ribbon. It has access to the semantic model, and
that's the BI semantic model on the right-hand side there. It allows you to configure and
customize visualizations for your reports using the field area, and all you have to do in order to
create one of these reports is simply drag and drop objects and see them come to life on your
screen.



So, Power View also allows you to go directly from authoring to presentation in very few clicks.
It's really easy to change the data and layout just by converting one visualization to another. It's
fully interactive, allows you to collaborate, and you can then share your reports very quickly on
SharePoint.



A little summary. Again, it's powered by Silverlight. It's fully thin, that means it's also cross-
browser and cross-platform compatible, and it's very easy to manage and discoverable inside of
SharePoint.



The new Power View capability is fully integrated into the reporting stack for Reporting Services.
It doesn't replace any of our existing tools, it's a new capability that enhances our existing suite
of tools.

We have three tools for Reporting Services for designing reports. The first is the Report
Designer tool, you'll see on the left-hand side. That's really geared towards developers who are
mostly interested in directly embedding reports into other applications. The Report Designer
tool is in Visual Studio, it's a fairly sophisticated design environment, allows you to do source
control, embed your custom code inside of reports directly. It allows you to build projects with
Report Viewer controls, and has a very rich design experience. As I said, it's targeted mostly at
developers and some IT pros.

In the middle, we have Report Builder, that's also very flexible in its ability to lay out data, fully
supports the constructs of RDL, and allows you to now, with SQL Server 2008 R2, also reuse
insights with that grab-and-go reusable parts of reports that I talked about at the very
beginning.

Report Builder is very targeted at IT pros and power users who want the flexibility and the
power of Reporting Services and RDL but don't want to be in the Visual Studio environment. It
gives them a nice, comfortable, familiar Microsoft Office shell, but doesn't restrict them in terms
of their depth of usage of Reporting Services.

And now we have Power View, which is our new offering. It's very much geared at end users
who want to explore their data, create rich data presentations that have very interactive
content, and also present their data and share it with others. And you can see that the
spectrum runs from embedded to operational to self-service reporting.




I'm going to go ahead and show you a demo of Power View to show you some of its rich
features.

Here we are in SharePoint, and you can see this is a normal SharePoint page with a document
library, and I'm going to show you a demo today using this Moovlia dataset in this folder.

So, I'm going to click on the folder, and inside this folder I have a data source that I'm going to
use and launch Power View from.

So, I'll click on the dropdown, and you can see there's a Create Power View Report button. I'll
go ahead and click that; Power View will be launched.

You can see that Power View is a full thin Silverlight application, and it's designed after the
Microsoft Office paradigms. You can see on the top there's a ribbon and on the right-hand side
there's a field list area, and the field list area provides me the information I need about the data
that I have.

So, in this particular dataset we're looking at movies data and downloads and revenues of
movies. I have information about my movies themselves, and I have information about the
dates of the downloads, the regions, the sales, and so forth.

I can start my report by simply adding a title. In order to explore my dataset all I have to do is
start selecting items in my list. I'll go ahead and select movies, and you can see my list of movies
shows up immediately, and I can start exploring and looking at the movies in my inventory. I can
scroll through and see that the most interesting fields about movies automatically showed up
for me. I have the title, the poster, the director, the provider, the genre, the rating, the user
rating. And that's actually just a subset of the different fields that I have about movies.

The underlying metadata or this model automatically tells me and shows me the most
interesting fields about movies, and they get automatically selected when I select the table.

One of the most powerful things about Power View is that we can transform the look of data
within a single click. So, I can take this table of data and easily transform it to a completely
different visualization by selecting a different visualization in this gallery.

For example, I can select this card visualization, and that exact same table of data is now this
card visualization, which is just a different layout of the same data, but it gives me a nice way to
look at this particular list.

We can also continue to explore by adding some additional visualizations to our report. First of
all, let's go ahead and take a look at the ratings of the movies, and see the breakdown of
downloads by the ratings.

So, I'll go ahead and go to the sales table and select the downloads year to date for sales.

You can see everything lands on the page as a little table in Power View, and then I can verify
that the data seems correct. Once I've done that, I can go ahead and select a completely
different visualization. For example, I can select for this data the column chart type, and it will
take the same table of data and transform it to a column chart.

As a user I didn't have to think about where to put items on the axes, on the different axes,
Power View decided for me and made the right decision about putting the rating on the X axis
and the downloads on the Y axis.

Let's go ahead and add another chart. I'll go ahead and select the genres of the movies, and you
can see the different genres: action, comedy, drama. And then I'll go ahead in this case and add
the revenues year to date.

Once I've done that, again I can verify that the data looks about correct, and then I can go ahead
and transform it to a different data visualization. In this case I'll select the bar visualization.

Within a very few clicks I've now created a very nice-looking report.

One of the nice things about Power View, though, is that when you create a report it's not just
the visualizations on the page. Because we understand the metadata behind this dataset, and
there is a model that determines all the relationships within the data, I automatically get
interactivity for free. So, for example, I can go ahead and click on this rated R bar and the
bottom chart will go ahead and show me the contribution of the rated R movies to the movies
by genre, and the list of movies will then get filtered to show me just the rated R movies. And
you can see, of course, these are rated R movies.

And I can do the same thing from the bottom chart. I can go ahead and, for example, click on
comedy. The top chart will then show the contribution of comedy movies, and the left table will
show just the list of comedy movies.

Let's go ahead and take a look at another visualization. I'm going to take this bar chart and
transform it to a scatter chart. Now, for the scatter chart I'm going to need to add a couple
more measures. So, I'm going to go ahead and add the downloads year to date, and the number
of titles is going to give me the size of the bubbles.

So, what I'm doing in this scatter chart is I'm comparing the revenue to the downloads, and you
can see immediately that our two largest sellers are comedy and science fiction movies.

I'll add a little more information. I'll go ahead and select the dates, and I'm going to drag this
month field to this play axis area. What that's going to do is allow me to take a look at this data
over time.

So, now I have a play axis, and you can actually see that the play axis is going to allow me to
animate and show the trend over time. I can click the play button, and it will go ahead and start
showing me the trends of those movies growths over time. You can see comedy grows very
steadily, and if it's not big enough I can go ahead and pop it out and take a look at it in a larger
size.

Let's go ahead and play that again. So, like I said, comedy comes out and grows very steadily,
and you can see that right at the end the science fiction bubble starts to grow, and it catches up
and surpasses the comedy sales right at the end.

I can actually look at the trends of those sales by clicking on the different bubbles, and that will
show me the spacing between the bubbles, and that's actually very important in this case
because it gives us an indicator that the trend is very different between those two genres of
movies. I can move backwards and forwards in time, and look at any period of time if I'm
interested in digging a little deeper.

So, let's go ahead and pop that back in, and another type of visualization that we can add in
Power View is to transform this table into what we call a tile. Because Power View is designed
for this screen we want to optimize use of space and give you different ways to navigate large
sets of data.

What tiles do is allow you to go ahead and navigate these movies one by one in this dataset, and
also gives you a little space to add information about each specific movie. Right now I have 102
Dalmatians selected, and what I'm going to do is add a little chart that shows me the breakout of
the movie sales by region.

So, I'll go ahead and add the region name, and for each region I'm going to go ahead and show
the downloads and the revenue.

And I'm going to turn that into a clustered bar chart. There we go. And that shows me the sales
of this movie in the different regions that I sell in.

I can now then go ahead and scroll through and take a look at any particular movie that I want
just by selecting it in the list. And you'll see that this visualization changes to show me details
about that particular movie, but these total visualizations over here do not change because they
represent summaries of the information across all movies.

The next thing I'm going to do is show you a couple of different views that I've already pre-
created, and we'll see a couple additional features of Power View.

So, in this particular report I've started with the same kind of view that I've already just shown
you how to build, and I've also added that play axis view here. And what I'm showing you on the
left-hand side of the screen is actually a view sorter where I can add one or more views in Power
View to the same report.

So, in this case I've pre-created two views here, and then in the third view I have a chart created
which shows me the downloads and the revenue by each individual movie, and I have a large
number of movies that I'm showing here.

I can easily go ahead and add color to this chart just by selecting a field to color by. So, I'll grab
the rating, and you can see in the field area here I have a color drop area, and when I drop that
in, it will go ahead and color each movie by the type of rating that it is. And I can see I've got
rated G, rated PG, PG-13, rated R. And if I select in the legend you'll see that the movies that are
of that genre get highlighted, and actually there's a very big difference in the distribution of the
revenue and downloads by genre. For PG-13 you can see there's a nice large distribution, but if I
look at rated G, for example, you'll see most of our downloads and revenues are not in the rated
G genre, they're very low.

So, that's one example of color usage and interactivity. Let's go ahead and move to another
view.

In this view you'll see that I've started, I have a chart that shows the genres of movies and the
downloads of the movies.

Now, I've already got a rating in the charts, so the chart's showing me color here.

What I really want to do is compare this information by each individual region that I sell in. So,
what I'm going to do is go ahead and in the field list take the region name and this time I'm
going to drop it on this area called vertical multiples. What vertical multiples does is that it gives
me a way to easily compare the exact same data across a particular different dimension, in this
case the region.

So, you can see that I've got a shared axis both on the left-hand side and on the bottom that
allows me to easily compare each of my different regions, and I can see that I have very low
sales in New England versus very high sales in the South, in the Midwest, and the Northeast.

And that's just a really easy way to compare data, and in order to create this view all I had to do
was exactly drop one field into this drop area. I didn't have to go and recreate a chart for each
of the different regions in my data.

Next I'm going to go ahead and show you a couple more examples of interactivity. You can see
here I've got a nice report created. On the left-hand side I have a slicer, which shows all of my
different genres of movies, I have a chart that shows downloads by genre, downloads by rating,
and also a little multiple that's showing me the downloads by month and genre.

So, what I'm going to do first is show you some sorting in this particular chart here. You'll see
right now I'm sorting the genres in ascending order by the label. If I click the ascending button,
it will automatically sort the genres in descending order. Now I have Westerns at the start
instead of action.

If I want to sort by the measure, I'll I have to do is click right here, and it will go ahead and show
me the genres with the largest sales first. And if I want to change that to sort in the other
direction, it's very easy, I just have to click the descending button to change it into ascending.
And now I have my comedy sales on the right-hand side.

The next thing I'll show you is some cross-filtering. So, you can see I have these ratings here. If I
go ahead and select any particular rating and click on it, you'll see what will happen is that I'm
going to get the contribution of that rating, the rated R movie sales, and down here I've also
limited the data just to show me rated R movie sales across the different genres.

And, of course, I can do the same thing here by selecting on comedy, and what you'll see is the
focus, the contribution of comedy movies, and then the bottom area focuses on comedy.

The next thing I can do is use the slicers that I have on the left-hand side of my report, and I can
select a few of my genres, and first I'll show drama, and then I can click on, for example, horrors
and documentary, and really focus on those three particular genres if I wanted to see sales for
those three.

That shows you some of the very interactive capabilities of Power View.

Finally, I'm going to show you a view that is a tile view very similar to the one that I showed you
at the beginning, except this tile is a large tile that takes the entire page. And, of course, I can
scroll through and now see very easily that I have all these movies in my inventory, and I can go
ahead and change the view to any particular movie, and all of the information inside the tile will
change to show me the sales information for this particular movie.

Within the tile I can also have the same type of interactivity. I have, for example, this region
name, and I can go ahead and just select southern, and this table down here below, which is
showing all states at the moment, will filter and show just the states in the southern region.
And you can see the contribution of the southern region to the sales and downloads, the
revenue and downloads of that particular movie.

Now I've shown you a set of really nice views that I've created here, and what I want to do now
once I've created the views is go ahead and share those and present those to others.

So, what I can do for that is go ahead and go to this home tab and in the home tab you'll see
there's a full screen button. And when I click the full screen button it's going to allow me to
present this data, very similar to the way that you would present a PowerPoint presentation.

I still have the full interactivity that I had while designing my report, except now what I'm doing
is walking someone through my thinking and my logic around how I came to some of the
conclusions that I came to in my analysis. I may want to do some interactivity like selecting and
clicking, for example, the science fiction category here, and I can go ahead and tell a story about
the different movies that are in the science fiction genre.

I can navigate through my different slides just by clicking the slide sorter and the find button
here, and alternately I can go ahead and actually look at all the slides and go and jump from one
to another if I need to skip a slide or go back to a slide, and that's very easy to do.

All right, so that gives you a little bit of an overview of the Power View capabilities in SQL Server
2012, and those are really again the recap of the three major investment areas that we've had
for 2012 for Reporting Services. The first is SharePoint integrated mode, the enhancements that
we've made to make Reporting Services a shared service of SharePoint, the alerting capabilities,
the new export formats, and also ad hoc reporting with Power View.



If we look ahead a little bit, in the same wave, in the SQL Server 2012 wave, we also have some
additional investments.



We've moved the development environment to Visual Studio 2010. So, now you can have a
single environment to build your BI solutions using Visual Studio 2010, and that uses the SQL
Server 2008 R2 engine.

Dev 11, Visual Studio 11 is also coming, and we're working on that release. We've made a
commitment that we will ship the developer experience within just a few months of any Visual
Studio release, and that will help you get some of the new functionality much sooner.



We also have a new service called SQL Azure Reporting. This is really cloud reporting. The value
proposition is really around developers and system integrators and IT departments. A lot of the
benefits are just the benefits that come with having a cloud application. This is an out-of-the-
box service that you can register for and you get all of the capabilities of Reporting Services in
the cloud. And it's elasticity, it gives you scalability and reliability of cloud computing. It's very
cost effective, and it's symmetrical so you can design and develop your BI solutions using your
desktop tools, specifically the BIDS environment, and then you can just simply deploy that to the
cloud. There's no changes that you have to make to your existing solutions just to have them
run in the cloud.

Right now, this is in beta form. In the V1 version of this offering, it's really about operational
reporting over SQL Azure data. So, the one important requirement to keep in mind is that SQL
Azure reporting needs to go against data that's in SQL Azure itself. You need to store your data
in the cloud when you want your reporting in the cloud. And then you can go ahead and embed
this cloud capability directly in your applications using our Report Viewer controls.

The architecture is very flexible and it gives you the infrastructure of SQL Azure as a data tier as
well as Windows Azure for hosting. The availability, the RS gateway includes tenant isolation
and smart routing and it has multi-tenancy and the performance is great because the Reporting
Services server can be co-located, co-resides with your end user data.

Currently in CTP form, you can go this URL to get some more information about it.




Just a quick reminder that when you're reporting for the cloud, you really can build the exact
same applications that you've had. You can use your existing reports. The one "gotcha" is that
you need to also have that data directly in SQL Azure.

So, you use BIDS. All you have to do is point the server the way you deploy to a different, a new
URL, which is a cloud-looking URL, like this as an example. And if you're interested in checking
out a sample of a cloud application that we've built and are hosting ourselves, you can go ahead
and go to this URL and take a look.



So, thank you very much for attending today's session on Reporting Services 2012. We hope
you enjoyed it and we'll see you at the next session.



END