Sql Server
Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) 2005 encompasses two components (very similar to what Reporting Services offers )
Server : Allows you to manage scorecards. It is comprised of an ASP.NET web service, a metadata database, and a series of Web parts that can be used in sharePoint sites. ASP.NET Web service provides interactions with other applications such as Biztalk , SharePoint and etc.
Microsoft Business Scorecard Builder : A windows Form application which provides a way to quickly prototype, create scorecards and publish them via the server component to SQL Server Reporting Services or Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies , so Builder is nothing except an authoring tool.
As for the integration of BSM with SharePoint products here is a summary of both versions :
1)SPS2003 (SharePoint Portal 2003): All functionalities of BSM is available , because it gives you the authoring tool to create scorecards and/or KPIS and it also gives you the server component to publish them to SharePoint. In addition to all these , it also provides some web parts that user can get an instant graphical representation of the KPI behavior.
2)MOSS 2007: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will be a supported platform for BSM 2005 for sure, but the existing product can NOT be installed on MOSS 2007 so we cannot give a proper answer until service pack 1 (ten weeks after MOSS 2007 is publicly available) is released. The Service Pack will include a roll-up of released Quick Fix Engineering (QFE) updates and a number of fixes that are specific to MOSS 2007 integration. To acquire BSM 2005 Service Pack 1 customers will require a BSM 2005 license. It is not necessary for current BSM 2005 customers running on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2003 to apply Service Pack 1. Service Pack 1 is required only when customer deploy BSM 2005 on MOSS 2007. It will be released through the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN).
I tried installing BSM2005 onto the RTM and BSM Server will NOT install. Seems some API's and database structure changes in SharePoint make BSM Server install fail. Here is it what it gives me:
Web Parts
Passed Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1
Passed Microsoft ASP.NET 1.1
Passed Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0
Passed Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 or Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003
Failed Microsoft SharePoint Extended Site
Web Service
Passed Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1
Failed Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) 4.0
Passed Microsoft OLE DB Provider for OLAP Services (MSOLAP) 2000 SP4 (8.00.2039)
Failed Microsoft ADOMD.NET 8.0
Passed Microsoft ASP.NET 1.1
Passed Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0
As you can see it is only looking for an older version of WSS and SPS for the web parts. For the web service it is complaining about ADOMD.NET 8.0 which I think is required to hook up the scoreboards to cubes for multi-dimensional processing.
Here is a fact sheet that gives you so ideas about this product:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/office/BusinessScorecardManager_2FS.mspx
This one talks about increased BI investment (including scorecard) in office 12 platform by Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/oct05/10-23BiLaunchPR.mspx
Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 Documentation can be downloaded here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D2F8C636-602D-4744-BA7D-D3821F8920D5&displaylang=en#filelist
And the trial version is here ( in two different components mentioned above)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=96F12385-AD47-494B-9DA4-60BBCD0D1B57&displaylang=en
Software and hardware requirements and a step by step how to articles are all explained here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101056881033.aspx
"There are so many SQL server database and structure comparison tools; may I know which one is better?”. Well this is one of the most frequent questions, asked in SQL Server communities,therefore I decided to clarify this based on my experience and the products I've used so far.
I mainly use Red Gate SQL Bundle developer edition for all DB related tasks and mostly for keeping my DBs in sync as I move up from dev to test to pre-prod and finally production, that’s why I prefer Red Gate myself. Doesn't mean it's "better", I think that's a personal subjective thing, but there are two more possibilities that I'm aware of:
1) Apex
2) DB Ghost
When I first used Apex SQL Edit, I was under the impression that their products are NOT as polished as they should be; it hangs a lot when it comes to huge databases and it hugs the resources a lot, so for the sake of this article, I took their products out of my benchmarking task. I’ve mucked around with DB Ghost a lot recently and I have found it to be extremely reliable and it provides additional capability beyond comparison e.g. a rock-solid process to upgrade your databases (same as Red Gate),but still believe that from a developer's perspective Red-Gate dose a better job than all its competitors. Below is only a feature comparison on Red-Gate and DB Ghost's most popular product.
SQL Bundle Developer Edition (Red-Gate):
SQL Compare and Synchronization:Yes
SQL Data Compare:Yes
DTS Compare: Yes (That's really handy if you are using DTS as an ETL tool)
Build Database from Script:Yes
Scripter:Yes
Extra:SQL Toolkit (APIs and command line tools to programmatically compare database objects are all exposed to the clients)
Price: http://www.red-gate.com/dynamic/shoppingcart/QuoteProductOption.aspx?Product=SQLBundleDeveloper
DB Ghost Professional Edition™
SQL Compare and Synchronization: Yes
SQL Data Compare:Yes
DTS Compare:No
Build Database from Script:Yes
Scripter:Yes
Extra:Nothing
Price:http://www.innovartis.co.uk/database_solution_Purchase.aspx
Recently I've came across another strange issue with reporting serivces.I'm hopping that all these stuff are well addressed in Yukon version ,or else :-) .I didn't make the database case sensitive collation in the setup and case sensitive collation was not also activated in any of the columns throughout the database. In one of my tables, there is a column called "Client_Type" which is of type Varchar and unfortunately there are some bad data sitting there (might be because of wrong UI validations or data conversion or whatever).Below is different chunks of data in that column.
PRIMARY
PRIMARY MAKER
SECONDARY
Primary
Primary Maker
Secondary
From database standpoint, there is no difference between "Primary" and "PRIMARY" (which is obvious as I didn't activate "case sensitive collation"),but when it comes to Reporting services it DOSE matter!! specifically in formulas and string manipulation functions. How come it is case sensitive in reporting services whilst is not in its backend database ?!!!
There is a possible workaround for this. Add ToString().ToUpper() to all field values used in comparisons. Of course changing the collation of the database is another possibility,but Just for your reference, specifying collation is usually done for the whole server in the installation of sql server and changing one database collation afterward is a bit tricky ,because if you have one database on a server which has a different collation to the server default, it will also have a different collation to TEMPDB. This can cause unexpected problems with sorting of results, and handling of #temp table data. Better, if you can, to get the whole server at the right collation.
if Address Windowing Extensions(AWE) has been enabled on a single instance of sql server 2000, after applying SP4, you got to apply .2040 hotfix as well, otherwise your SQL server instance only uses 50% of the available physical memory that sucks:).
1) run the following script from SQL Query Analyzer to determine if AWE is enabled on the server :
sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1
go
reconfigure
go
sp_configure 'awe enabled'
go
If run_value is set to 1, AWE is enabled on the server.
2) BTW After applying the SP4, just make sure that it has been installed properly as I’ve heard that some broken installations of SP4 are not reported properly. Run the following query in Analyzer and you should get the following results.
Query in Query Analyzer:
SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('productversion')
SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('productlevel')
Result after applying SP4:
8.00.2039
SP4
Result after applying SP4 and its hotfix :
8.00.2040
SP4
Couple years ago I was struggling a bit with timestamp (Also known as ROWVERSION) and DateTime data types in Sql Server as I wanted to have the date and time of when each record in Table is modified in my application. Yesterday I saw couple of posts in the newsgroups in this regards so I decided to explain it again here for those who have the same issue.
If you want to have the last modified date and time of each record then you have two options:
1) Define the field as datetime in your database and then in your stored procedure use something like this:
CREATE PROC NWtest
@endDate datetime = NULL
AS
IF @enddate IS NULL
SET @endDate = GetDate()
SELECT OrderDate
FROM Northwind.dbo.Orders
WHERE OrderDate<@enddate
Order By OrderDate
GO
The reason is that the default in storedproc must be a constant or NULL
2) Open the table in Design mode in enterprise manager(Or much better, use ALTER TABLE in Query Analyzer), find the column, and in the "Default Value" enter (GETDATE()).Now you won't have to worry about populating that column in any procedures Because SQL Server will put in the current date and time when the record is
inserted.
TIMESTAMP is an unfortunate misnomer, as the data stored here really has nothing to do with TIME at all. ROWVERSION is an equivalent data type and is the syntax I recommend when using to track changes to a row, if for nothing else, to avoid this very ambiguity. Also, I heard that in some future version of SQL Server, the TIMESTAMP designation will go away.You can see these articles:
http://www.aspfaq.com/2448
http://www.aspfaq.com/2499
Having said this ,I thought that when do people ever use timestamp - I mean, why was it ever included. I understand it to be an 8 byte binary number that changes when a record changes, and is unique within the scope of a database, but I don't see the benifits of using it. It doesn't provide an audit trail of row data as far as I know, and is not a candidate for PK as it changes over time.What benifits are there for using it?. I put my newbie hat on and I did some goole searches ;-)
Answer:
Optimistic concurrency ( Simple ,isn’t it? :-)).When you read a row to present to a user, read and store the value in the timestamp column, When you later issue the UPDATE:
UPDATE tbl
SET ...
WHERE pkCol = Your_Primary_Key_Value
AND tsCol = OriginalTimeStampValue
Then check number of rows modified by the UPDATE. If 0, the row was either deleted or changed or updated by somebody else while you were looking at it.