sql 2016 | Under the kover of business intelligence

Overview of Published Articles – 2016Q1

Koen Verbeeck — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 09:53:13 +0000

Here is an overview of the articles I published in the first quarter of 2016.

R Services series:

SSIS & AlwaysEncrypted:

The Future of SSMS

Koen Verbeeck — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 13:00:42 +0000

One of the smaller announcements amidst the gazillion new features of SQL Server 2016, is that SSMS is now a separate installation. You heard that right (read, probably), no more dragging along those bulky .ISO files with the entire SQL Server set-up just to install some client tools. Just like SSDT, you can now just download Management Studio from the interwebs.

What’s even better is that you can now also get automatic updates! I opened SSMS and suddenly I got a lovely notification in my system tray that there are updates for SSMS. Isn’t that great? Clicking on it gave me the following dialog:

Nice. Don’t get too cocky though, clicking the Update button just takes you to an MSDN download page where you can download the latest version. Baby steps.

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Overview of Published Articles – 2015Q4

Koen Verbeeck — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 11:40:23 +0000

Here is an overview of the articles I published in the final quarter of 2015:

I also started a small series on the new SQL Server R Services:

There are two more articles in this series, so stay tuned! Also, two articles about SSIS & AlwaysEncrypted are in the pipeline to be published.

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Reporting Services redesign – it’s the little things

Koen Verbeeck — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 13:00:56 +0000

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is getting quite the overhaul in SQL Server 2016. Lot’s of things are changing:

new look ‘n feel for Report Builder: Report Builder Changes in SQL Server 2016
new chart types (check out my sunburst, treemap and heatmap articles)
a (somewhat) customizable parameter pane
HTML 5 support
and many, many other stuff (see also What’s new in SSRS)

And these are all awesome changes. But sometimes it’s the little things that make me smile.
For example, I was toying with SSRS 2016 CTP3.0 and I wanted to insert a new chart. Suddenly I noticed they had updated the little chart icons in the dialog:

You can find a screenshot of the old dialog in the sunburst article.

How neat is that?

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What’s new for BI in SQL 2016 – Session materials

Koen Verbeeck — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 13:48:04 +0000

SQL Server Days 2015 is over and it was a blast. Met a lot of people from the #sqlfamily, too many to mention, and I saw some interesting sessions. My favorites were David’s session about loading data faster and Catherine’s session about BIML (yes, both are related to SSIS). I gave a session on the new BI features in SQL Server 2016 and it went great: demos didn’t crash and I stayed within the time frame. The room was almost full and the audience seemed to enjoy itself.

You can find the slidedeck on Onedrive:

Most of the code for the demos can be found in my articles on MSSQLTips.com. There’s a slide at the end with resource material that contains the links to the relevant articles.

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New SSRS features in SQL 2016 CTP 2.4

Koen Verbeeck — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 12:00:13 +0000

SQL Server 2016 CTP 2.4 hasn’t been released yet (any day now I guess), but someone was apparently very eager at Microsoft because some of the MSDN documentation pages are already updated. One of those pages is What’s New in Reporting Services. There we can see three new features will be added:

PDF replaces ActiveX for remote printing. The less ActiveX the better.
PowerPoint rendering and export. I asked a bit around and some people couldn’t care less, some people are really enthusiastic about this. It doesn’t hurt to have an extra choice though. I’d like to try it out soon.
And the big announcement: Custom Parameters Pane. You’re going to have some sort of table structure where you can add parameters. More information can be found at Customize the Parameters Pane. I’d definitely like to try out this one! It’s one of the biggest pains in SSRS: not having any control over the parameter prompts (except their order). I’m curious if you can add regular text boxes to this table structure, so you could for example add an explanation for the users on how to use the parameters.

More info will follow once CTP 2.4 has been released!

UPDATE:

SQL Server 2016 CTP 2.4 has been released, and can now be downloaded from here. No extra new features for SSRS have been included, but there are some small ones for SSIS (basically “stuff you had to download separately is now included in the product”).

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MDS 2016 CTP 2.3: tiles greyed out in Manager

Koen Verbeeck — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 11:53:04 +0000

I’m toying around with MDS 2016 CTP 2.3 in preparation of my SQLServerDays session about what is new for BI in SQL Server 2016. I uploaded the sample models into MDS and I opened up Master Data Manager in Internet Explorer to try out some of the new features. The Manager has received a make-over in the SQL 2016 preview, but two of the tiles were greyed out:

Quite annoying to say the least. Also, the version drop-down box doesn’t show any values. After a bit of Googling, a stumbled upon this MSDN thread, where it is explained it’s a bug which will be solved in the next release. If you’re an early adopter like me (and you want to actually do demo’s), you want this fixed now of course. Luckily there are two work arounds:

Use an Application under the MDS website instead of a top level website. (this should correct some of the URLs)
Edit the index.js file and correct the issue directly.

Since the first one is practically Chinese for me, I opted for option 2. In the index.js file (found in c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\130\Master Data Services\WebApplication\Scripts\) you need to locate /api/Models/ and change it to api/Models/.

Problem solved:

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SSIS – Unexpected Termination

Koen Verbeeck — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 12:00:52 +0000

I was toying around with the new SQL Server 2016 CTP release and I wanted to run a few SSIS packages to test out the new logging levels. However, everytime I ran a package in the SSIS catalog, it ended with the dreaded “unexpected termination” message. In such a case, nothing is logged to the catalog, so you can start digging for the cause that makes your SSIS packages go dead before they start running.

There are a lot of reasons why you can get the unexpected termination message (and for some of those there is a fix for SQL Server 2012 and 2014). But looking at the event log I could quickly track down the root cause:

Cannot find the symmetric key ‘xxx’, because it does not exist or you do not have permission.

Since I’m the admin on the machine, I certainly have permission so it means the key doesn’t exist. Then I realized I had upgraded SQL Server a few times: from SQL Server 2016 CTP 2.0 to 2.1 to 2.2 to 2.3. Apparently somewhere in the upgrade process, the symmetric key of the SSIS catalog was lost. Since this is a simple virtual machine for playing around with SQL Server 2016, the solution was simple: delete the SSIS catalog and create it again. Bingo, all packages ran again without issues. However, if you’re on a production machine, you might want to take precautions for this issue when you upgrade your SQL Server instance.

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Speaking at SQL Server Days 2015

Koen Verbeeck — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 09:02:57 +0000

I have the great pleasure to announce I’m speaking for the 5th time at the Belgian SQL Server Days! The SQL Server Days is the largest SQL Server conference in the Benelux (and maybe beyond :)) and is hosted by sqlug.be. It will be great to see the #sqlfamily again. A lot of amazing speakers have been announced, such as Aaron Bertrand, Klaus Aschenbrenner, Nico Jacobs, Denny Cherry, Matan Yungman, Niko Neugebauer, Dejan Serka and many, many more (listing them all would make this sentence way too long :)). There are also some excellent precons (too many to choose from).

My session is titled What’s new for Business Intelligence in SQL Server 2016.
The abstract:

The preview of SQL Server 2016 has been released right before the summer and it already seems this will be the biggest Business Intelligence release ever! A lot of features and improvements have been announced for SSIS, SSAS, SSRS and even MDS. In this session, you’ll get an overview of what you can expect in SQL Server 2016, accompanied with live demonstrations of course.

Expect demos of SSIS (of whatever they have released at that point in time), temporal tables and SSAS Tabular. And hopefully a lot more when CTP3 is released. You’ll also get an overview of what you can expect of SQL Server 2016 when it will be released. Normally I won’t discuss Power BI features, unless relevant.

You can check the agenda here. You have until today (15 July) to register with the early bird discount! Hurry!

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