Report Builder 2.0 & Reporting Services 2008

We're still on reporting services 2005 but I've playing with Report Builder 2.0 in which you can see some of the features of Reporting Services 2008 such as the long-awaited control tablix. Very Nice! you can download it from here [http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9f783224-9871-4eea-b1d5-f3140a253db6&displaylang=en] The builder looks really cool and the look-and-feel of Office 2007 and many more improvements of the VS Designer for RS 2005. 

Of of most annoying bugs in 2005 was that when you make a change to a query in the report DataSet+ and save the report using CTRL+S (or click save icon), the DataTime parameters were converted to Strings. But so far I haven't seen this happening in RB 2008.

One way I worked around the bug I mentioned (DateTime converted to Strings) is by building the query after making the changes and before CTRL+S  ( or saving).

Other welcomed additions to Reporting Services 2008 are the better charting capabilities and the Gauge controls.

T-SQL: A Set-Oriented Language + Ranking Functions

The other day I had a query that invloved several tables and complex logic to a certain degree. The initial query involved using user-defined functions and the such and it took roughly 12 minutes to run which was not acceptable. After a little bit of tweeking and thinking of sets and not procedural logic I managed to the query to run in under 10 seconds for the same amount of data. Thanks partially to t-sql ranking functions [ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189798.aspx#]

Dense_Rank was especially useful. Unlike Rank(), Dense_Rank() does not leaves gap in the sequence of numbers desginating ranks.