SSRS and DBA Scope

business-intelligencedata-warehousessrs

Just a quick questions regarding DBAs, recently I was asked about the scope of DBA in terms of SSRS and BI, in your experience who handles and maintain/configure your SSRS, is this part of the DBA or Sysadmin. and for Datawarehouse do we need a DBA to develop that or a DW engineer?

Thank you for all who will answer.

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tl;dr I've been volunteered for SSRS, SSAS is hard, Power BI is easier and users can start to get it once you've given them a basis to work from.

This is just in my past experience and I'm just one guy... so, take someone else who has experience of many shops and add this one for flavor.

I've maintained and configured SSRS myself. But then I did it at another shop where I was a developer and there was no DBA. It hasn't needed much that way, but in the past couple of places I've never been in a place where the users could set their own subscriptions, so IT had to manage that also. It's not hard, but you may need to write up an instruction if you plan to palm that off.

As far as writing reports, our devs have done it in both locations, but I keep an eye on the sql running, and the ExecutionLog (a view in the SSRS db) to make sure nothing is performing badly.

As far as DW - I have had a couple of SSAS courses and I just don't grok it well. Partly it's because I think you really need to do it, and there has never been actual time set aside for me to create and maintain one, so the knowledge went to waste. I found it difficult to create one when I did it. If you're going that route then I'd advise trying to get a professional who has done it several times, to get the "right" data.

Instead, towards the end of my last job, and in this job, I've found we're using Power BI a lot more, and that's a lot simpler to set up. I've ended up making views that denormalize data, and created some basic data models so people can make their own Power BI reports based on that. It's not simple to pick up Power BI DAX, but it's not unlike VBA, or creating Excel formulas... and other devs and BA types are picking it up as well.

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SSRS Instances – Native Mode and SharePoint Integrated Mode on Same Server

So after messing with this off and on for a while I figured it out. It is possible. All this was done on one server with SharePoint 2013 enterprise and SQL Server 2012 Enterprise with SP2.

I have a default SQL server instance with all features selected, specifically the shared features "Reporting Services - Sharepoint" and "Reporting Services Add-in for Sharepoint Products". Then you have to run through the installer again and add a new instance. Then select "SQL Server PowerPivot for Sharepoint" (relational database check box at this point was not needed). After you do this you have to activate this feature in SharePoint. Here is a blog on how to do the PowerPivot setup.

Make sure this instance is at the same service pack level once you install it. After this I followed this walk-through, starting at step 2, to enable SSRS in SharePoint.

That is pretty much it. I now have a native SSRS site and SharePoint integrated SSRS site as well as PowerPivot/PowerView all on the same server. All databases are on the default instance. I only have SSAS installed for the PowerPivot instance and that is it.

SSRS and Informix connection

When I use an Informix command finderr, I get the output shown:

$ finderr -23101
-23101  Unable to load locale categories.

An invalid locale name was supplied for the locale initialization.
The environment variable specifying the locale category has a wrong
value. 

Check the value of the corresponding environment variable,
CLIENT_LOCALE or DB_LOCALE. If this error was encountered when using 
the "SET COLLATION" statement, check that the value passed to the 
statement is a valid locale. If this error was encountered when using
the "SET NO COLLATION" statement, check that the session's default 
locale file is still available. Also check if INFORMIXDIR points to
a valid directory where IBM Informix products are installed.  

If a client application receives this error when it requests a database
server connection, check that the client and database locales are
compatible. They are compatible if a valid locale exists on the server
computer with the name lg_tr.codeset@mod, where lg_tr (language and
territory) and mod (locale modifier) are from the CLIENT_LOCALE and
codeset is from the database locale (from the DB_LOCALE, if it is set,
or as stored in the database).

$

That's probably clear as mud, but 'unable to load locale categories' probably means that $INFORMIXDIR, which defaults to /usr/informix on Unix-like systems (and something like C:\Informix on Windows systems IIRC) is either not set correctly or is pointing somewhere invalid. In particular, locale categories are stored in $INFORMIXDIR/gls.

That's the easy part; the hard part is knowing what you need to set. Have you checked the SETNET32 setting? Have you checked the OBDC connection configuration? I believe SSRS is a Windows-based system, and I'm by no means a Windows expert, so there's a limit to what I can do to point you in the right direction. But having more detailed information about the error than 'unknown system error' may help you.

You could also look at the Informix manuals on the IBM Informix Information Center 12.10 web site.

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SSRS Instances – Native Mode and SharePoint Integrated Mode on Same Server

SSRS and Informix connection

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