Power Of POWER BI

Getting Started....

Microsoft Power BI is reach of features, rich graphics and supports numerous data sources.

To use MS Power BI features you have to signup here. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/

1. User your organization Email Id for signing up. Microsoft will use your Organization Office 365 Licensing for this.
2. It verifies your organization email id and Password.
3. You will get free access but will be limited to few sources and samples only.
4. To have full access you need to purchase Power BI Pro features.MS provide a 60 days trial pack for pro features :-)
5. Once sign up it will take few seconds to setup a Power BI work environment for you.   
6. Following which it will allow you to connect to you with multiple data source options within or outside your organizations

5. Here I am creating a sample data source using Xlsx (Local File Source) as Source
6. you will get following like environment

7. It same as Excel Pivot with little bit different layout but more charts like MAPs.
8. Following is a sample report-

9. Overall dashboards will look like

Well I have just started here. Please look for more on this in coming days…………………..

  

Migration Options For SSRS

Migrating of reports from one SSRS version to another is now a very common requirement. 

There are few tools available in market which can make help in migration process 

Here is in this article i tried to list down their pros and cons -  

1. Using SSRS ReportSysnc Tool

By using this tool I was able to deploy reports to SSRS 2012 from SSRS 2005.

 (Available at : https://code.google.com/p/reportsync/)

Advantage	Dis-Advantage
1. Very quick in migrating report	1. Does not deploy data source
2. Deploy subscriptions as well	2. Need to create Data source manually and re link reports to data source.
3. having source and destination side by side help in understanding synchronization	3. This makes it  time consuming approach.

2. Using  RSScripter - ExecSQL.org Tool

This tool really worked well and will definitely ease migration task.

(Available here http://sqlserverfinebuild.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Install%20Reporting%20Services%20Scripter)

Advantage	Dis-Advantage
1. Deploy reports and data source both	1. After migration shared data sources need to be re visited for inserting passwords, only if user id and password are hardcoded.
2. It has migrated report model as well.	2. Subscription are not able to migrate.
3. It script out all the ssrs code which needs to be than taken to migrated (new) server and need to deploy their using command prompt utility of SSRS.	3. Manual work of deploying SSRS script to migrated server is required with some minimum changes to script based on server details.
4. Working very smoothly and I have not faced any problem in deployment while migrating  couple of existing projects.

3. Manual Migration process  -

This is an obvious approach, that we manually migrate all the reports.

Advantage	Dis-Advantage
1. Safest approach as one by one report will be taken and deployed and tested.	1. Very long, time consuming and tedious approach.
2. can fix issues and do enhancement if required while migrating.