What's New in SSRS 2008 R2 Data Visualization

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 2008 R2 provides three new ways to visualize data in reports: maps, sparklines and data bars, and indicators.



Maps
Report Designer provides a Map Wizard and Map Layer Wizard to add maps and map layers to your report to help visualize data against a geographic background. You can add labels, legends, titles, a color scale, and a distance scale to help your users interpret the map display. You can add interactive features such as tooltips and drillthrough links, or provide parameters that enable a user to interactively control the visibility of each layer.

Sparklines and Data Bars
Sparklines and data bars are simple charts that convey a lot of information in a little space, often inline with text. Sparklines and data bars are often used in tables and matrices. Their impact comes from viewing many of them together and being able to quickly compare them, instead of viewing them singly. This makes it easy to see the outliers. Sparklines and data bars have the same basic chart elements of categories, series, and values, but they have no legend, axis lines, labels, or tick marks.

Indicators
Indicators are minimal gauges that convey the state of a single data value at a glance. The icons that represent indicators and their states are visually effective, even when they are used in small sizes. Indicators can show trends by using directional images such as arrows; ratings by using incremental icons such as stars; and states by using images such as traffic lights or check marks.

Click image to enlarge

Key points on using Filestream attribute

According to this study from Microsoft Research, SQL Server handles BLOBs smaller than 256KB more efficiently than a file system, while NTFS is more efficient for BLOBS larger than 1MB. SQL Server 2008 introduced the Filestream storage attribute for varbinary(max) data type to store data in files.

Here are the steps to begin using this feature:

Enable Filestream storage at an operating system level using SQL Server Configuration Manager (system administrator). Then enable it on a SQL Server instance level using sp_configure (database administrator). See specific steps here or here.

Define a database filegroup that ties an NTFS file system location to a SQL Server database. It must be a local file system location.

Add a varbinary(max) column to a table definition with the FILESTREAM property. Add a uniqueidentifier column with the ROWGUIDCOL property (required).

Read and write the data through the stream-based APIs to get the performance advantage attributed to the Filestream property. In .NET 3.5 SP1 such support is provided by the SqlFileStream class.

Example of column definitions:

  Photo VARBINARY(max) FILESTREAM NULL,
  RowId UNIQUEIDENTIFIER NOT NULL ROWGUIDCOL UNIQUE DEFAULT NEWID()

Reference:
Bob Beauchemin, Programming with FileStreams in SQL Server 2008, MSDN Magazine

SQL Server 2008 R2 Training Kit

While attending the Philly .NET Code Camp this past Saturday, one of the presentations was around an overview of the SQL 2008 R2 features. From the presentation, I learned that Microsoft is making the new R2 features available through a download that you can configure locally onto a VPC. The training kit will assist you in learning the product as it provides demonstrations, hands on labs, and videos in the kit itself.

The Training Kit can be found on the Microsoft Download Center at the SQL Server 2008 R2 Update for Developers Training Kit page