SSRS support for Power BI Desktop - preview download available!

A preview of the on-premises SSRS with support for Power BI is now in preview.  We'll technically, it's called "Power BI Report Server" preview.  But under the covers, as far as we know, it is an enhanced version of SSRS.  For the SQL Server 2016 release, Microsoft completely rebuilt the SSRS engine, with full support for HTML5, and now Power BI Desktop reports.

About a year ago, we reported that both the SSRS and Power BI teams indicated future Power BI support as part of SSRS. And earlier in the year, we did an initial review of the Azure based VM that included the enhanced SSRS engine. That review found that SSRS did indeed do a nice job with Power BI Desktop reports.

The preview download is available here:  Microsoft Power BI Report Server - May 2017 Preview.

Power BI Desktop to SSRS -

Back on November 10, 2016, we wrote about the coming support for Power BI Desktop reports by SSRS.  See Upload Power BI Desktop .pbix to SSRS 2016.  We'll a few days ago, on May 3, 2017, the SSRS Team Blog posted an announcement that it was almost ready.  Almost.

It's called Power BI Report Server, and as of May 8, 2017, it is still in the "...coming soon." status. The sort-of good news is that if you have an Enterprise Edition, per-core license, with Active Software Assurance (SA), it is included. Or if you have Power BI Premium licenses.  For all the rest of us, we'll not so much.  If you have looked over our earlier review, it seamlessly worked with SSRS's rebuild engine. So, we are hoping that this is still the case.

You can review the official Power BI Report Server introduction here: Introducing Power BI Report Server  , along with the SSRS Team Blog here:  Introducing Power BI Report Server for on-premises Power BI report publishing.

Getting to ISO format 'yyyyMMdd' with a single function?

The Goal:

Convert a date in SQL Server into the ISO format 'yyyyMMdd' with a single function, and without having to CAST a character value into an integer.  Alas, we have yet to find such an approach.

Before the FORMAT command, the most expedient approach was to use the CONVERT function, combined with a second convert function, or CAST the value to an integer value.  For example:


 declare @adate date = '2017-05-01';
 select 
 ISOdate_CONVERT = cast(convert(varchar(12), @adate,112) as int);

FORMAT

Starting with SQL Server 2012, we were introduced to the FORMAT statement. It had promise, but like the CONVERT statement, we still had to issue a second CAST statement. Output from FORMAT is nvarchar. Sure, we could skip the second CAST function, and just rely on the implicit conversion from nvarchar to integer, but that would be poor form.  SQL Server still has to make the conversion, and we have to believe that an implicit conversion is not only sloppy, but perhaps a bit slower. So, with FORMAT, we now have two options to convert a date, or datetime into an ISO formatted date - yyyyMMdd.

 declare @adate date = '2017-05-01';
 select 
 ISOdate_CONVERT = cast(convert(varchar(12), @adate,112) as int)
,ISOdate_FORMAT  = cast(format(@adate,'yyyyMMdd','en-US')as int); 

Which to use?

Since have not done any performance testing, either one would suffice. What we would all like is a method of converting a date directly into an ISO format, with a single function.