Charlie Maitland’s Blog

Sorry another off topic post

We are where?

I came across this spoof from Channel 9. Whilst it relates to Games designers I bet we can all relate this to some application designs we have come across.

Joining the Dots has a post about how search engines can try and cope with the variety of meaning of words in language.

One of my favorite talks from TED is Erin McKean’s so I found this very interesting.

I have to say that the key feature that is keeping me locked to Google as a search engine is its Suggest page.

Chris Webb has a some posts on caching in Analysis Services and its advantages.

I spotted this post by James Rowland Jones that adds to the options “Finding when SSAS has ramped up its cache”

Unfortunately it is only a feature for Enterprise Edition SQL Server. However he has promised us a set of posts on Enterprise only features that could be the spark for some interesting debates.

A post from Chris Webb prompted me to answer a question that a number of people have asked; “Can I use Reporting Services to do…”

This is normally based around the need to either toggle a value or add a commentary to a value, usually something along the lines of “I couldn’t submit my budget because the dog ate my spreadsheet”.

Depending on the scenario my response is either:

No, its a reporting tool not an application platform

or

It can be done but not natively.

To do a simple action on data you can have a link to a sub report passing in parameters. The sub report can be based on the SQL Stored Procedure that, when it is run modifies data. The downsides to this are that the user cannot input any data and the user is taken from the master report to a sub report of limited value.

To do anything more complex I have added a link to an ASP.NET page, passing parameters. The ASP page can then do whatever you want it to do. This gives total power but requires more coding. It may also need consideration of your security model.

So in conclusion, it IS a reporting tool but with some hacking things can be done.