One of the new things I noticed in Yukon’s Reporting Services is that the new data provider for Analysis Services. This data provider comes with its own query builder which is handy if you’re not comfortable writing your own MDX query or prefer using a UI to build a query. You can drag and drop objects (levels, members, measures, etc) into a results pane where you can automatically see the results of the change to the query. How fast you see the query results depends, of course, on the cube. If this auto-execute behavior slows you down too much, you can disable this feature and execute the query when you’ve finished building the query. For hard-core MDX developers, there is a query view which lets you enter an MDX query directly but you need to make sure that your query returns a flattened rowset. Reporting Services isn’t geared to work with multidimensional data in the reports.
When using the Analysis Services data source, the query gets added to the RDL both as a command text (like you saw in RS2000 for any query) and is parsed into an XML format called a Query Definition. Its purpose seems to be related to the query designer in BIDS. When I removed the Query Definition from the XML, I could still view the report in preview mode, but when I switched to the Data tab, my query was completely gone and I could no longer preview the report. This means that if you’re developing applications that generate RDL, you don’t need to worry about generating the Query Definition unless you plan to work with the generated report in BIDS.
One thing I really like – at least conceptually – is the ability to set up a report parameter from the MDX query builder, but beware this is still a work in progress. Essentially, you can specify a dimension as a parameter, which in turn sets up the report parameter and the dataset for you as well as modifies the MDX query to use parameter in the query. I’ve experience some odd behavior with this feature, but my understanding is that there will still be some changes to this in future builds. I’m looking forward to seeing how this winds up working.
--Stacia