What?
Sounds easy but actually if you use an image which has transparent areas, ie. has one color which will be transparent, the transparent pixels will be colored in with the page background color.

Why?
I want an image to display per row as a status marker for 3 different types of results: Success, Failure, Unknown. My images are circles with the background being transparent. I want the first column to display an image based on the status result.

If I simply insert an image, the report would use the background color of the report.
How?

What?
This article details a method we used on a search form in a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) environment. The requirement (amongst others) was that the report ran in less than a few seconds.

Analyzing the report through the ReportServer databases (internal auditing) only showed how long the SQL query would take to recover the data and present it in a report, which would average about 0.4 seconds.

We're obviously not interested in shaving off time from 0.4 seconds; no, we're more interested in the fact that 0.4 Microsoft seconds seems to translate to about 10 minutes in the real world. Where do the extra 9 minutes come from? Not the SQL as this runs in 00:00 seconds in SQL Server Management Studio. Not the internal processing and rendering as the report server says it did this in 0.4 seconds. So where's the problem?

How?

What?
A very quick note on why borders may be misbehaving in SSRS. This note corrects the situation at Design time. This is where you are trying to select a cell to have an outline border but then cells around it without a border. You may find that BIDS or Report Builder (however you're building your report) will apply the border to some cells and sometimes a whole section of the report with just one border???

How?

What?
A quick article on if you are trying to create a new subscription to a SQL Server Reporting Server (SSRS) report and you are getting a warning message similar to the following:

Message from webpage

Subscriptions cannot be created because the credentials used to run the report are not stored, or if a linked report, the link is no longer valid.

Why?
The problem happens because of the data source used in the report. For static data source connections, this is straightforward but in our case, we have a report which points to different servers based on a report parameter.

How?

Applies to:

• Microsoft Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008 (BIDS)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

What?
This article describes solutions to the error:

Subscriptions cannot be created because the credentials used to run the report are not stored, or if a linked report, the link is no longer valid.

How?

What?
So I've spent a fun time googling and binging but still haven't found a simple and complete example of getting a resultset from an Oracle stored procedure and displaying this in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Well "non-productive" more than "fun" as most of the examples on the net are either half-complete or partially documented. So here goes...

• Using Business Intelligence Development Studio v2008 (BIDS)
• SQL Server Reporting Services v2008 R2 (SSRS)
• Oracle SQL Developer v3 (you can use any equivalent, eg. SQL*Plus)

Why?
I think this is one of those very rare occasions that Microsoft people can say "it's so much easier using a Microsoft product to work with another Microsoft product" (ie "Seamless integration"). Yes, I'm trying to get an SSRS report to display the results from an Oracle stored procedure. I have a previous article describing a basic stored procedure in Oracle, this article aims to outline how to apply this to an SSRS 2008 R2 report.

What?
I have created an SSRS report which can compare 4 reports side by side and brings up their latest execution times to the nearest millisecond. The report has 4 parameters. Each parameter is a dropdown populated by a list of all available reports.

Why?
I want the report to be run with the 3rd and 4th parameter as OPTIONAL. When I leave the 3rd and 4th parameter untouched (="<Select a value>"), the report complains saying "Report #3 parameter cannot be blank!". Before you ask, I have ticked both "Allow Blank" and "Allow NULL".

How?
This is the tough part. I was reading up on the MSDN page for the closest solution but it still didn't work for me. But the idea of inserting a NULL entry to select sounded good.

Aim / Objective
The plan will be to replace the default "<Select a Value>" with a custom null entry and the end-user will be none the wiser.

Why?
I've recently written a report for SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2 (SSRS) which will compare up to 4 reports and will compare the time taken for each one. The breakdown or what I was able to measure with the default installation are the times taken for "data retrieval", "processing", "rendering", and then the totals of these.

I haven't Googled this at the time of print so there may be a million better solutions out there, this is just how I did it. This may look like a horrible report which would fail an accessibility test but visually it says straight away which is the better report; and when comparing to the previous runs (using a second dataset) you can tell where changes were made and how this affected the reports' performance.

What?
What I'm trying to do is display a set of results (comparing various reports) in a table and then to color the backgrounds based on whether they are the fastest or slowest in the set.

Something like: