Category Archives: SQL Server 2012

SQL Server 2012 & Project Server, Part 2– Business data visualisation with PowerView

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PowerViewIn this second post looking at some of the new capabilities of SQL Server 2012 and how they can be leveraged in your Project Server farm, we are going to look at PowerView.

PowerView was originally announced as Project Crescent and has wowed pretty much anyone that has seen it. In essence, PowerView allows you to build visualisations of your data using a simple drag and drop interface that are ‘Presentation Ready’ meaning there is no nasty wiring up of data, simply drag your data onto the surface and being analyzing it.

PowerView can leverage data from two types of source, a Tabular model in SQL Server 2012, or a PowerPivot workbook stored in Excel. Of the two, the latter is by far the easiest to get up and running.

To start with I am going to assume you have set up your farm to leverage PowerPivot, this requires adding a special ‘PowerPivot’ analysis services instance to your farm and then configuring the farm to use it. The whole set up experience has gotten better in SQL Server 2012, but it’s still fiddly requiring a wizard to be run and a number of content types to be manually added to the relevant reporting library. There is a great video taking you through the whole process here , including how to set up the server side and the Excel client PowerPivot add-on.

In my case, I was keen to try out PowerView against Timesheet data mainly because I worked at an organization that used timesheets extensively and was familiar with the data model and some particular reporting use cases I wanted to try.

To start with we need to import the Project Server data into PowerPivot. To do this, open up the PowerPivot for Excel add-on and choose to import from a SQL Server Database.

Get data from SQL Server

 

A table import wizard will be shown, configure it to point at your Project Server Reporting database and click next twice, you will then be presented with a list of all the tables and views available in the database to use for reporting. As I am interested in timesheet info, I am going to pull in some timesheet only tables and a couple of the generic _userview tables.

Importing into PowerPivot

 

PowerPivot will then proceed to import the tables and this is where the really clever stuff will start, in most cases PowerPivot will be able to automatically infer the relationship between the tables, but as I have chosen to pull in the EPMProject_UserView and EPMResource_UserView tables I need to help it with the relationships.

 

PowerPivot Relationships

Creating a relationship is pretty easy, simply choose ‘Create Relationship’ from the design ribbon and select the relevant tables and joins.

 

Manually create relationships

The final step before building the PowerView was to save the PowerPivot back into the gallery in SharePoint.

PowerPivot uploaded into SharePoint

 

Once the PowerPivot Excel spreadsheet is in SharePoint we can start to build the PowerView by clicking on the PowerView icon which will open the designer.

Create Power View Report

The designer will show a design surface on the left and a list of entities on the right hand side. To start building the PowerView simply select the relevant information on the entities and drag it onto the design surface.

PowerView Designer

PowerView will automatically highlight the entities that are related from the relationships either detected automatically or manually set.

Once the entities have been dragged onto the design surface, PowerView allows the user to select the best way to visualize the data, allowing the user to change the layout and visualization method (table, graph or tiles). The PowerView can also be further refined through the use of slicers and filters.

PowerView visualisation

So in about 15 minutes I put the above timesheet analysis PowerView together, showing all resources in the organisation, and a breakdown of Planned & Billable work across the month, week and projects all with a few drag and drops.

The real power of course comes from interacting with the PowerView, so clicking on a resource name will change the data, clicking on the projects of hours breakdown will automatically cause other parts of the PowerView to filter as can be seen below.

Filtered PowerView Visualisation

There are a number of other parts to PowerView that I haven’t explored in this post, specifically things like Play Axis that allows you to see data sets changing over time, which would be interesting to wire up to some of Project Server timephased data, the ability to embed the visualisation into a PowerPoint slide, card and tile visualiations to name but a few. Luckily Microsoft have released an excellent tutorial over at TechNet that takes you through the process of building PowerView from start to finish. If you have SQL Server 2012 installed and are using Project Server 2010, I challenge you to get cracking to wire up some Project data and amaze your executives and PMO !!

SQL Server 2012 & Project Server, Part 1 – Reporting Services Data Alerts

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Project Server has a fantastic reporting story, with a dedicated reporting database containing pretty much every piece of data you put in, and a myriad of ways to retrieve, tabulate and visualize that data for the end user. With a little customization or configuration it is possible to build reports that will show the status of the project portfolio, risk and issues and just about anything you want to see. With such powerful reporting it can quickly become difficult for a Project or Portfolio manager to identify the projects or information they are interested in seeing.

Enter Reporting Services Data Alerts, a new capability in SQL Server 2012 that allow users to create specific alerts when a data condition in a report occurs. For example, an organization could have a specific report that highlights all risks across the project portfolio, however the portfolio manager may only be interested when one of their projects is on the report with risks of high or critical. With a SQL Server Reporting Services Data Alert, the portfolio manager could create a data alert on the report that will would automatically send a copy of the report to them when the conditions are met.

Setting up a data alert is incredibly simple. To start with, run the report that you wish to set up the data alert on. In this example I have a very simple report that shows the number of extreme risks across all projects in the portfolio.

Risk Exposure Report

 

On the actions menu, select new data alert (If you are trying this yourself and the New Data Alert option is disabled, then you may need to set modify the report dataset to use a shared data source with stored credentials).

New Data Alert

 

A dialog will pop up showing the different components of the report and allowing the user to define the different conditions that will cause the alert to fire.

Define the new data alert

 

Finally, the user can configure how often the data alert will poll, ranging from minutes up to months, and where to send the alert.

Select frequency

The output from the alert is a nicely formatted email containing the report, details of the rules used to generate the alert and links back to the underlying report.

Email Alert

Reporting Services also provides a mechanism for a user to view all the data alerts they have
configured as well as to modify, delete and run data alerts outside of the schedule.

Data alert manager

All in all this is a pretty handy capability to provide your users should you be running SQL Server 2012.

SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services and Project Server – A match made in heaven

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SQL Server 2012Back in 2011 I sat in a session at TechEd Australia where Carolyn Chau showed off a number of the reporting enhancements coming in SQL Server 2012. SQL Server 2012 is a massive release, providing a stack of new features across all aspects of the server . Some of my favourites include things like Availability groups, support for Server core, a new Visual Studio based management to name but a few. I remember coming out of that session excited at the thought of plugging in the Project Server reporting database and seeing what it could do.

Fast forward to March this year and Microsoft officially confirmed that SQL Server 2012 was supported for SharePoint and Project Server SP1 upwards, so what better time to spin up a farm and give it a whirl?

So coming up in the next two posts I am going to look at two of the new Reporting Services features and how they can be leveraged in your Project Server farms. In the first post we are going to look at SQL Server Reporting Services Data Alerts and in the second, PowerView (formerly known as Project Crescent).