Building custom reports for SQL Server management 26 June 2014 Nico-Jacobs Business Intelligence, SQL Server, Reporting Services, Talks Recently I presented a session at the ITPROceed conference on ‘Administration intelligence’: using Business Intelligence solutions for analyzing log files, generate documentation, do disk quota estimations and other typical administration tasks. You can find the full presentation at SlideShare. In this blog post, I want to focus on one of the techniques explained in this talk: creating Reporting Services reports to run in Management Studio. SQL Server Management Studio reports SQL Server Management Studio contains a bunch of predefined reports. In the Object Explorer, right click any database, select Reports –> Standard Reports and you get a listing of nearly 20 predefined reports: If we select any of these reports, a new tab open in Management Studio in which the report renders. There are a few special things to notice about these reports: They can be exported in PDF, Word and Excel format, as well as being printed It can be a multi-page report. There is no explicit way to go to the next or previous page, but if you scroll past the end of the current page, you go to the next page. The report is context sensitive: if you open the same report by clicking on a different database, it shows information for that specific database. Before we dive into building our own reports, I just wanted to point out that we have these predefined reports not only at the level of databases, but also at the server instance level, as well as on the Data Collection node (Management), the Integration Services Catalogs (from 2012 on) and the SQL Server Agent node. Just go ahead and try these predefined reports: They provide very useful information without the effort of building reports yourself… plus they might inspire you in building your own reports. From report consumer to report producer These predefined reports can make our life easier, but sometimes you want a report different from these predefined reports.Building a custom report is easy. Step 1: Retrieving the data The first (and often most difficult) step in creating any report is in retrieving the right data. Luckily SQL Server provides tons of information via the many management views. Just start typing SELECT * FROM sys. and the completion tool will show you the huge list of possible completions. If you want to read more on these before you continue, checkout the web, e.g. mssqltips.com has some interesting reading material for you. In this example we want to report on log file sizes: what are the biggest log files I have on any server, and home many room for growth (or shrinking) do we still have in there. A query with which we can get started is this one: SELECT *FROM sys.dm_os_performance_countersWHERE counter_name IN ( 'Log File(s) Size (KB)' ,'Log File(s) Used Size (KB)' ) AND instance_name <> '_Total' This returns a table such as this: But in reporting it is important to present the data as easy digestible as possible. It is easier to build reports if different measures (in our case log size and log used size) are in different columns versus all in one single column (as they are right now). The PIVOT statement in T-SQL might help us out on that. Also, simple resorting and renaming might improve the readability of the result. So after a bit of a rewrite we end up with this query: SELECT [Database Name] ,[Log File(s) Used Size (KB)] AS LogUsedSize ,[Log File(s) Size (KB)] AS LogTotalSizeFROM ( SELECT RTRIM(instance_name) AS [Database Name] ,cntr_value AS [Size in Kb] ,RTRIM(counter_name) AS [Counter Name] FROM sys.dm_os_performance_counters WHERE counter_name IN ( 'Log File(s) Size (KB)' ,'Log File(s) Used Size (KB)' ) AND instance_name <> '_Total' ) AS srcPIVOT(SUM([Size in Kb]) FOR [Counter Name] IN ( [Log File(s) Size (KB)] ,[Log File(s) Used Size (KB)] )) AS pvtORDER BY [Log File(s) Size (KB)] DESC Just copy the query in the clipboard, we will need it for the next step: Step 2: Building the actual report To build a report which we can run in Management Studio, we need to have SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) installed (the tools formerly known as Business Intelligence Development Studio, BIDS, so you can use BIDS as well if you’re not yet on 2012). This is part of the regular SQL Server setup, so you can find it on your SQL Server 2012 or later installation media. But you can also just go and download it from the Microsoft Download Center. After downloading, installing and starting this tool (which is just a Visual Studio template), we instruct it to create a new project. In the list of installed templates, you should find back the Business Intelligence group, select the Reporting Services group within, and on the right, click the Report Server Project Wizard and provide a useful project name: Once you click OK, the wizard will start. Click Next to get past the start screen. On the next screen the wizard asks which type of database connection we want to have, and to which server and database we want to connect. This is the tricky part, because we actually want to connect to whatever server and database we click upon in Management Studio object explorer. But now, we first need to develop this report in SSDT. Luckily, there is an easy way out: If we use the Microsoft SQL Server data source type, whatever server and database we select will be replaced with the ‘current’ server and database whenever we run this from Management Studio. So lets just connect to a server (I’m using localhost over here, but any server to which you can connect from SSDT will do): Notice that if you want your report to not query the current database but a fixed database (e.g. always master or msdb), you should use three part names in your query (e.g. SELECT * FROM msdb.dbo.suspect_pages). Next screen asks for the query to retrieve the data for this report. Paste the query we’ve written earlier in this blog into this window. The next screen asks for a report type, just confirm the tabular report. Then we have a screen that asks for the report design. Just drag all three fields into the Details window and click Finish. Then we hit the last wizard screen where we give this report a meaningful name: Log Size. Click Finish. Step 3: fine-tuning the report After we finish the wizard we end up in the editor. Click the preview tab to get an impression of what the report will look once deployed: This report only looks slightly better than the table we got in Management Studio earlier on. We need to make a couple of improvements. Switch back to the Design tab to widen the database name column (just drag the column header to the right). Finally we want to have a graphical indication on the size of these log files. To achieve this, right-click the rightmost column header in our report and add a column to the right: Next, from the Toolbox window, drag the Data Bar component into the bottom cell of this newly created column. In the pop-up window, just confirm the default data bar type. Finally, click the blue bar that appears in this cell. On the right another pop-up window appears. Click the green plus next to Values and click LogTotalSize: Now preview the report again: Step 4: Run in Management Studio Now that we have a report which is easy to read, let’s make sure we can easily open up this report in Management Studio. In SSDT, in the File menu select Save Log File.rdl As... In the save dialog, navigate to My Documents > SQL Server Management Studio > Custom Reports and save it over there. Notice that this is not required, Management Studio can open reports from any file location; It’s just the default location for these files. Finally, we can now open up Management Studio, right click any object in the object explorer, select Reports > Custom Reports, and select the file we just saved there. If you can connect to multiple instances of SQL Server, try out this report on all of them, and you will see how the report takes the server context into account. Right click to print and export the report… you can have all the options we had on the predefined reports. This is not the end of it, it’s just the start. There is a lot more to learn about building Reporting Services reports, as well as about all the useful information we can extract from SQL Server. So, give it a try! Download If you just want to download the .rdl file we created in this post, you can find it at http://1drv.ms/1yQjzMD
SQL Server 2014 In-memory OLTP (a.k.a Hekaton) @ Techorama 10 June 2014 Nico-Jacobs SQL Server, Talks A few days ago I presented a session on the In-Memory OLTP engine in SQL Server 2014 at Techorama, the Belgian developer conference. I talked about the good things In-Memory OLTP does, and the limitations it has. If you want to go through the slides and code examples again, feel free to download these from my OneDrive.