Free SQL Help for Devs, DBAs, and the Curious

As the data landscape continues to evolve with the advent of new technologies like Azure SQL, Delta Lake, and Databricks, the need for efficient reporting solutions has never been greater. One such solution is the SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services), a comprehensive extensible reporting platform included in the SQL Server 2022 suite. A particularly useful feature of SSRS is the ability to create parameterized subreports. These subreports allow us to create modular dashboards, which can greatly increase the efficiency of our reporting processes.

To create an SSRS parameterized subreport, we first need to create a main report and a subreport in SQL Server 2022. The subreport would typically contain data that's related to the main report, but it's flexible enough to contain any data that you'd like to show. Here's a simple example of how to create a parameterized subreport:

-- SQL code goes here

-- Create a stored procedure for the main report

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.MainReport AS

SELECT CustomerID, CompanyName FROM Customers



-- Create a stored procedure for the subreport

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.SubReport @CustomerID INT AS

SELECT OrderID, OrderDate FROM Orders WHERE CustomerID = @CustomerID

In the case of Azure SQL, the process is slightly different due to the cloud-based nature of the service. It is important to ensure the Azure SQL database is properly configured to allow SSRS to connect and retrieve the data. Once that is done, we can use the same stored procedures as above to create our reports.

Delta Lake, an open-source storage layer that brings ACID transactions to Apache Spark and big data workloads, can also be utilized in combination with Databricks, an end-to-end analytics platform powered by Apache Spark. By leveraging these technologies, we can further optimize our SSRS dashboards by ensuring transactional consistency and reliability of our big data workloads.

Microsoft's Fabric service can be leveraged to deploy and manage our SSRS reports. Fabric is a platform that allows developers to build and manage microservices and containers. By deploying our SSRS reports on Fabric, we can achieve high availability, automatic scaling, and a simplified deployment process.

Last but not least, OpenAI's SQL integration can be used to further enhance our SSRS dashboards. OpenAI can be used to develop advanced analytics and machine learning models, which can then be incorporated into our SSRS reports. For example, we could use OpenAI to predict sales trends and then display these predictions on our dashboard.

In conclusion, SSRS parameterized subreports allow us to create modular dashboards that can greatly increase the efficiency of our reporting processes. By leveraging technologies such as SQL Server 2022, Azure SQL, Delta Lake, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, and OpenAI, we can create powerful, scalable, and highly efficient reporting solutions.