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Business Intelligence in the cloud, phew thank goodness… #Office365 #BI #SharePoint #PowerBI
So the Worldwide Partner Conference is going on in Houston at the moment and as much as I would love to be there, unfortunately projects here in London have to continue. Still early starts and watching the world go by in Pret (coffee shop for those outside of the UK) is always interesting before the hub-bub of the day starts.
Anyway, as with every year at WPC, there are always exciting announcements and this year is no different. We can hail this as official business intelligence in the cloud day!
Now many of the projects I work on consider Office 365 as a platform, however the more enterprise you go, the more the requirements tend to need some level of business intelligence. I was excited before with the release of SQL Reporting Services Online, however as functional as it is, limitations and costs current pose this solution to be only for the fully cloud invested.
My new hopes for BI in the cloud however seem to be starting to be answered in the form of Power BI for Office 365.
Using the capabilities already available on premise (Data Explorer, GeoFlow, Power Pivot and Power View) with tweaking, some re-branding and a little bit of mobile love (mobile apps to be available also (Windows 8, RT and iPad, HTML5) it looks like we may have an answer.
This to my mind almost completes the Office 365 capabilities to truly propel the cloud for use in the projects I get involved in. (Project Management, Business Intelligence, Intranets, ECM solutions).
I urge you all to read up on the following and register for the preview coming “later this summer”. I have a feeling this is going to be major!
Details:
- Main Announcement Blog: http://blogs.office.com/b/office-news/archive/2013/07/08/announcing-power-bi-for-office-365.aspx
- What powers Power BI in Office 365 (O365 Blog): http://blogs.office.com/b/office365tech/archive/2013/07/07/what-powers-power-bi-in-office-365.aspx
- Introducing Power BI (SQL Server Blog): http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2013/07/08/introducing-power-bi-for-office-365.aspx
- Register your interest here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/power-bi-FX104080667.aspx
- Download the preview add-ins for Excel here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/power-bi-download-add-in-FX104087144.aspx
- Tutorial: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powerbi/archive/2013/07/07/getting-started-with-pq-and-pm.aspx
As I try things out, I will post my findings and any limitations I come across, but hopefully with the new OData / REST capabilities of Excel and SSRS, we should be able to have some fun with SharePoint list data!
Enjoy…
SSRS Web Part Performance 2008 R2 vs. 2012 Initial Results #SharePoint #SP2010 #in
On one of my client projects, we heavily use SQL Server Reporting Services in SharePoint integration mode.
The benefits in comparison to Native mode are primarily around the RS SharePoint Add-in which allows us to use query string (URL) filter web parts to pass parameters to reports and create powerful dynamic dashboards as well as using SharePoint to permission and store the reports.
There is an issue however. Performance in this mode is not amazing, as detailed here:
- http://sqlcat.com/sqlcat/b/technicalnotes/archive/2010/11/03/reporting-services-performance-in-sharepoint-integrated-mode-in-sql-server-2008-r2.aspx
- http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/635080/ssrs-2008-r2-and-sharepoint-2010-performance-issues
- http://www.sqlchick.com/entries/2011/1/25/whats-up-with-the-slow-ssrs-r2-rendering-in-sharepoint-2010.html
- http://blogs.msdn.com/b/prash/archive/2011/06/11/performance-of-ssrs-in-sharepoint-mode-reports-in-full-page-view-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx
Now that SQL Server 2012 has gone to RTM, we can start to get a measure of how well the new web part performs and I am pleased to say that the improvements appear to be great so far…
The Scenario
- SharePoint Version: 2010 SP1 – December 2011 CU with Project Server
- DB Server: SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1
- SSRS Version: 2008 R2 SP1
- SSRS Add-in: 2012 (Denali) – RTM
- Server Architecture: 1 x WFE / App Server (Virtual) + 1 x SQL Server (Virtual)
NB: All testing has been carried out on our DEV server, please always try out new software on a development / test environment first to ensure the benefits and to safe guard production from issues.
The Reports:
Table based reports rolling up Project Server and SharePoint data based on parameters provided by the end user (Cannot show due to client confidentiality I’m afraid).
The Results:
Now this is just a teaser really since we will be doing full testing on our master development environment, but for now…
Project Portfolio Table Report
- Number of returns items: 17 rows
- Number of parameters: 1 (Portfolio ID)
NB: All time taken in seconds using Fiddler2
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As you can see, we are seeing significant time increases with the new web part and within my client we have the go ahead to carry out further testing.
More useful links:
- SSRS 2012 Installation – Liam Cleary: http://blog.helloitsliam.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=66
- Installing SSRS 2012 without upgrading your DB Server: Todd Klindt: http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=324
- MSDN: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh231671.aspx
SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans 