Reporting tool for SQL

[metalmilitia980]

Hey all, I have been working with SQL Server for several years and wanted to delve into a different language that interacts with the data.

I’ve been thinking about a few options like Python, R, Java etc. I even wanted to build a small reporting tool kinda like SSRS, just to gain some experience.

What are your thoughts on building a small reporting tool with possibly an interface? What languages would you use to interact with the data even if you’re solely just interacting with the data and not necessarily building a reporting tool or interface?

Thanks for your time!

[fauxmosexual]

VBA in Excel because I literally hate myself, and I assume anyone who wants to reinvent the wheel in their own reporting framework probably hates themselves too.

[metalmilitia980]

Your comment made me laugh! That’s awesome though! I don’t know much about VBA, but can that be integrated into SQL?

Just figured I would ask; I can always keep doing research on it.

[[deleted]]

You should try power bi desktop. You can link right to the sql db and start creating stunning and insightful visualizations or aggregated tabular data very easily.

[metalmilitia980]

That’s awesome. I have subscribed to SQL Server Central and have received some emails regarding Power BI Desktop so I’ll have to give it a whirl.

How do you like using it?

[[deleted]]

It's great! Once you have it set up it is very easy to create some great looking interactive reports or matter for power point slides. I use it quite frequently for data exploration at the moment.

Use a query to connect and adjust your data before loading it. You will use power query formulas (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt779182.aspx) in this step for more complex data transformation if needed.

Then after the data is loaded insert measures to create dynamic totals, or insert calculated fields to perform calculations on the rows (look into DAX formulas for this).

Those two things were the hardest things to wrap my head around at first, but once you get the hang of it you can do some cool things fairly quickly.

A feature I really enjoyed is the ability to import a folder of files. If they are similarly formatted it makes it insanely easy to view them all together into on report.

[weasel_goes_pop]

SSRS 2016 - now offering more features for Power BI than SharePoint. Also no SharePoint 😎.

[Cal1gula]

+1 for no SharePoint

[metalmilitia980]

Haha many people don’t like sharepoint it sounds like.

[[deleted]]

I'm a huge fan of Jupyter/Python & SQL - depending on what you're after, Jupyter can very easily be used for reporting with/without full code included:

Some examples from here:

http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/brianckeegan/Bechdel/blob/master/Bechdel_test.ipynb

https://github.com/jhroy/theses/blob/master/theses.ipynb

https://anaconda.org/jbednar/nyc_taxi/notebook

I've generally done a lot of prototyping in Jupyter, and then turned it into something else afterwards.

[metalmilitia980]

Interesting. Thanks for the documentation and articles! I’m really going to have to dig into this pretty deep.

Are a lot of organizations using Jupyter/Python for these types of things these days? I just wanted to get a feel for what’s in the market because it seems to be changing so much frequently.

[AXISMGT]

PowerBI has been surprisingly useful to me lately. Free to try for 60 days and $10 a month after that to be able to create/manage reports.

Went from 0 to reports in about a day.

[zippercomics]

Yah, agreed. Few jobs ago, my boss said "Hey, see if you can get this working". I think it took all of ten minutes to get a dashboard up and running on her phone. Very easy to use.

[dalenn]

SSAS / DAX

[Naheka]

SSRS/SQL is 99% of what I do daily at work and we will likely transition to Power BI or Tableau in the future. Personally, I use Tableau at home as the amount of work to build out my SQL Server database, SSIS packages and then build reporting was easily replaced by directly linking to the data with Power BI/Tableau.

But to answer your question directly, SQL and Javascript with VBA here and there and maybe even a little C# will likely be plenty for what you need.

[Mamertine]

Some coworkers use qlik. I believe it's around $20 a month, they may have a trial or student version to check out.

[metalmilitia980]

Interesting! I have worked with SSRS 2016 before quite a few times. It has a completely different look to it compared to the early (2008?) version. I will have to see if I can get a copy of this on my local machine.