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coolerbob
Aged Yak Warrior
841 Posts |
 Posted - 2005-05-24 : 03:54:13
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| I'm a Reporting Services / OLAP newbie.I have a few questions for you kind souls to answer:I see that there are not many posts here relating to Reporting Services here. Is it because:a) It's not that goodb) It's really easy yo do (which is not what MS says about designing Cubes correctly)c) Developers haven't bothered finding out what it could do for themd) ...?We have some data that only (really) needs to be updated nightly. But we have other data that it would be brilliant if we could update every hour - even every ten minutes if it wont have a much bigger performance impact than every hour.What is a realistic low(er) maintainance plan for populating the OLAP DB:a) With DTS packages overnight for some and Replication every hour/10 minutes for the other?b) Just keep it all the same and update it all with replication every hour/10 minutes.c) ...?/** sql sui generis **/ |
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byrmol
Shed Building SQL Farmer
1591 Posts |
Posted - 2005-05-24 : 04:24:20
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| I'll leave other to do the RS stuff.Do you know the different "flavours" of OLAP? HOLAP, MOLAP & ROLAP?Try ROLAP first.. reads directly from the "relational" source (your DB), and requires minimal refreshs. Heavy on the OLTP DB of course.. so check your throughput.DavidMA front-end is something that tries to violate a back-end. |
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coolerbob
Aged Yak Warrior
841 Posts |
Posted - 2005-05-24 : 07:12:58
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| Thanks David. I think what I will do it use two servers. One for OLTP (ServerA) and one that is an exact copy that gets updates via transactional replication (ServerB.DatabaseA). I'll then do ROLAP on ServerB so that OLTP users are not effected. That is what the problem is at the moment because users are running normal reports directly on the OLTP server.Unfortunately some of the RS features I require are only available in the Enterprise version - which is £14K instead of the £3K per processor for Standard. I'm going to struggle to sell that to management so I might have to bin the whole OLAP idea and stick to conventional reporting. What a shame. Maybe the answer to my first question is exactly this: It's too expensive! |
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tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess
38200 Posts |
Posted - 2005-05-24 : 12:37:15
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quote:
Originally posted by coolerbob
I'm a Reporting Services / OLAP newbie.I have a few questions for you kind souls to answer:I see that there are not many posts here relating to Reporting Services here. Is it because:a) It's not that goodb) It's really easy yo do (which is not what MS says about designing Cubes correctly)c) Developers haven't bothered finding out what it could do for themd) ...?
a) I like it.b) Yes it is easy to use for simple reports.c) Not a lot of people have rolled it into production, but rather just sampled it.d) A lot of people are probably posting on the RS newsgroup instead of in here.Tara |
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rockmoose
SQL Natt Alfen
3279 Posts |
Posted - 2005-05-24 : 17:31:46
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| MOLAP + incremental updates can be an alternative to ROLAP.rockmoose |
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jhermiz
3564 Posts |
Posted - 2005-05-24 : 22:30:02
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quote:
Originally posted by coolerbobI see that there are not many posts here relating to Reporting Services here. Is it because:a) It's not that goodb) It's really easy yo do (which is not what MS says about designing Cubes correctly)c) Developers haven't bothered finding out what it could do for themd) ...?
a) I too like it ... I like it a lot :)b) I wouldn't say it is easy, it also is a learning curve just like anything else...but I'll tell you, I rolled out a lot of advanced reports that took me ages in crystal reportsc) RS is fairly new...in fact they just released a service pack for it, some companies (large and small) have spent thousands if not 100's of thousands of dollars in other reporting tools, only to find out that what they wanted as reporting tool became a nightmare to administerd) .... I take it you're speechless...Try it out...the license is free if you put rs on your sql box (with a valid sql license)...play with it...then purchase it and seperate it from your sql box.PS: I do think this forum (Reporting Services) gets great traffic for a reporting tool. I've seen forums where absolutely no one is posting in the crystal reports forum...
Keeping the web experience alive -- [url]http://www.web-impulse.com[/url]Imperfection living for perfection -- [url]http://jhermiz.blogspot.com/[/url] |
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coolerbob
Aged Yak Warrior
841 Posts |
Posted - 2005-05-25 : 03:53:04
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| Thanks for that guys (esp. the Tara goddess ofcourse). Much appreciated. Turns out management may sensibly bite once the ROI is done.jHermiz, unlike Tara, you say you have rolled out advanced reports. To do my sales pitch it may help greatly if I can show drilldown functionality (and as many other benefits as posible) using a desktop control. I looked at the office web components one and it looked like a real waste of time and not very user friendly. I will ofcourse be doing many custom implementations of retrieving cubed data and displaying it in certain ways. But I'm just checking that you guys haven't come accross a handy control that I can hook up to the OLAP data to show what's possible (and maybe continue to use if it's really good). Sorry if I really shouldnt ask this question here. |
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tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess
38200 Posts |
Posted - 2005-05-25 : 12:24:50
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| Ummm, I didn't say I hadn't rolled out advanced reports. I have. We've got some reports with embedded code, others are calling .NET assemblies, and others are just doing fancy things in the report.Tara |
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1st timer