The Severed Cortex

Link: http://www.newhorizons.com/content/CatalogSearch.aspx?Core_PK=200003004

My goal was to try to post something to my blog every day this year. Obviously I've blown that. In fact, it only took me a couple days to blow that. My excuse for not posting from the 8th through the 10th was because I was in a training class near our Baltimore office. (OK, I was bored on the 10th and posted stuff while in the training class).

If you care, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services isn't much. If the world of BI were cars, SS2005 RS would be a Chevy Cavalier. Practical, simple, and somewhat functional. You wouldn't want your friends to see you driving it though. I was dispatched to this training for three reasons.
1. To make sure two of my staff that went with me learned how to navigate the program.
2. To get an idea where we might be able to leverage this technology since basically Microsoft is giving it away with SQL Server 2005. Since Magellan is a beta test site for Microsoft, we get SQL Server 2005 for free too. Well, not entirely for free since they want to sell you consulting services and use your company name in their sales pitches.
3. My boss thinks it's a good idea to get out of the home office occasionally to get some face time with my counterpart team in Baltimore.

While SS2005 RS is a decent reporting tool, it doesn't measure up to most. Our primary reporting tool Actuate doesn't do any one thing great, but it does way more than most any other BI tool does. It runs circles around this Microsoft reporting software. I do think I've found a niche for it at work though. We provide our customers with a web based dashboard which basically consists of series of graphs (Corda) to show them summary data of their companies utilization. i.e. - How many employees have called in for services? or Dollar values of claims that were filed from providers treating our employees. Now a lot of those customers are clamoring for the details behind the graphs. When dealing with healthcare data and the PHI rules, showing data on the web can be a real pain in the ass. Basically you have to scrub it so it has no identifying characteristics. SS2005 RS may solve the need for us by providing quickly developed simple reports, although it won't solve our security/PHI issues. We'll have to clean the data ourselves.

For you BI nuts out there:
Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Home Page
We're also looking at switching graph engines and we just got Rich Charts and Fusion Charts inhouse. The days of detail listing reports are over; you can tell people more with a picture than you can with a thousand columns of data. I learned that from Edward Tufte who is basically a BI genius.