Business-Intelligence

I spend a lot of time on client sites and time and again, one of the mistakes that I see people making, is trying to start with large projects. I think one of my all time favorite quotes about IT is:

Any successful large IT system used to be a successful small IT system.

The next time you’re thinking about creating a project that’s going to have a big bang outcome, please remember this. The history of the industry is that it really is likely to be a big bang, and not in terms of being a big success like you’d hoped for.

2019-01-18

Recently, I posted about the templates folder for SQL Server Reporting Services designer moving in Visual Studio 2017. You’ll find that blog post here.

I’ve also now found that the Private Assemblies folder has moved too. I do wish these locations would be fixed, shared, and known rather than needing to play hide and seek when updates are made to the SSRS designer tooling.

The Private Assemblies folder was used to hold a copy of any .NET assemblies that are referenced in your SSRS projects. By using .NET assemblies, you can share logic that’s used in reports. It’s worth noting that wherever we can, we try to avoid using .NET assemblies for this, and wish that SSRS had a way of dealing with common code inclusions, but that’s a topic for another day.

2018-06-18

I’m always telling students that one of the first things you need to learn to do when working with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is to create report templates.

Now I really wish that SSRS had a real templating system, but what we have at present is just a folder that contains the items that we can create. For example, in an SSRS project, if I right-click Reports, and click Add, then New Item:

2018-06-12

In  a recent blog post, I wrote about the ANSI_NULLS option for tables and after that I had several more questions related to NULL values.

Note that I mentioned NULL values, not values of NULL, and not values equal to NULL. That’s because “being NULL” is a state that a value is in, not itself a value. That’s why our queries say IS NULL and not = NULL.

Now because of that, many developers see values that  are NULL as a pain in the neck as they have to be dealt with separately, unlike other values. This can lead to many poor design decisions but I want to start today with the decision to use magic values.

2018-04-10

Whenever I need to work on a new laptop or server, or whenever I change versions of SQL Server Management Studio, I kick myself for not remembering to export my settings, so I can import them again.

I spend quite a bit of effort getting SSMS configured the way I want, so it only makes sense to save the settings. Saving them isn’t perfect but it’s far better than not having done it.

2018-03-01

If you’ve ever used SQL Server Reporting Services, you’ll notice that when you drag a database column into a table, it auto-magically converts the name of the column into a more English-readable name.

Image from MSDN

Notice how when the LineTotal column has been dragged into the table, the heading has been set to Line Total with a space. What it is doing is taking a Pascal-cased or camel-cased name and separating the words with spaces, based upon where the capital letters are.

2018-02-28

A current trend that I can’t say that I love is constant churn within software applications. I have no interest to go back to the days where we got a new version of SQL Server or Power BI, etc. every few years.

It’s also not a case of who moved my cheese?

In fact, I thrive on change. However, I’ve now become really concerned about how anyone:

• Learns to use a complex application
• Remembers how to use a complex application when they don’t use it daily

I first really struck this issue with Azure. If I was teaching a class that used Azure, I could check every single lab on Sunday night, then Monday morning, the students would find it had all changed. That’s OK for an experienced person, but not OK for a learner.

2018-02-20

In an earlier post, I discussed the design of EAV (Entity Attribute Value) tables, and looked at why they get used. I’d like to spend a few moments now looking at the pros and cons of these designs.

Let’s use the same table as the last time as an example:

Pros

The main positive that’s typically described is that the schema is “flexible”. By this, the developers usually mean “I don’t have to change the database schema (or worse, have someone else change it) when my needs change”.

2018-02-19

I spend a lot of time in large organizations that have spent an absolute fortune on highly-available systems, yet when those systems fail over (just as they were designed to do), most of the applications in the building break.

Why?

Because the developers have assumed that nothing ever breaks and have written their code in a far too optimistic manner. Did they do their jobs?

No

Is it possible for their next layer of code to deal with, say, a server disappearing for a few seconds? Of course it is. But it’s not going to happen by accident. It’s even more important in a cloud-based world.

2018-02-09

One of the problems with applications that have highly-configurable user interfaces (UI) is that users can end up configuring them in ways they hadn’t intended, and then don’t know how to get back to where they were.

I remember the first time that I was at a session with a presenter from Microsoft showing the (at the time) new personalization options in ASP.NET. You could build a website and let the user determine how the site should be laid out, to suit themselves.

2018-02-08