SSRS

Last month I posted about configuring SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to integrate with Power BI, which is a new feature included with SQL Server 2016, and adds more to the ever-growing capabilities of Power BI.

In this post I will explain the easy steps to publish report items from a report to a Power BI dashboard.

The first step is of course to build a report for SSRS, and then publish it to the report server. Make sure that the report server compatibility is set to the new “SQL Server 2016 or later” value. In my case, I quickly put together this ugly report that connects to the AdventureWorks database:

Once published, and once you navigate to Report Manager and run the report, apart from the new toolbar, you will notice a “Pin to Power BI Dashboard” button on it. Clicking on this will confirm if you want to go through with signing in to Power BI and granting it permission to access your reports as well as other components.

Once that’s all settled, you will be directed to choosing the report items that you want pinned to the dashboard. Notice that tablixes are disabled and only charts are allowed to be published. This makes sense since data on a tablix can grow to great lengths:

Clicking on an enabled report item prompts you to choose the dashboard and the frequency the report item should be refreshed with data:

Lo and behold! The two report items are now pinned to an existing dashboard, and clicking on these report items will navigate to the report:

Behind the scenes Reporting Services creates a timed subscription per report item that is pinned. The timed subscription uses a SQL Agent job to refresh the report based on the selected latency. Hence, if you get this error when you are trying to pin a report item to a dashboard, then your SQL Agent is probably not running:

All in all, I think this is an important feature in Microsoft’s suite of BI tools where components of enterprise reports can be pinned to a self-service dashboard, whereby giving more value and a greater chance for adopting the suite as a complete BI solution.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), the de-facto reporting tool in the Microsoft business intelligence stack has been losing attention while its cousin Power BI, has been stealing the limelight with updates and goodies coming out at a regular pace. While, Power BI is a nice little tool for flashy reports and dashboards, it lacks the features to build complex reports. But that is just how Power BI is meant to be used. But once in a while there comes a requirement where someone might think that it would be nice to have a portion of an SSRS report pinned onto a Power BI dashboard – SQL Server 2016 makes this possible.

When configuring Reporting Services in SQL Server 2016 (I’ve noticed it beginning CTP3) using the Reporting Services Configuration Manager, you will see a new tab for Power BI Integration.

SSRS_PowerBI_Configuration_01