Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Operational dashboards should display any variations that would require
action in a way that is quickly and easily noticeable. KPIs are used for
effectively showing the comparison and drawing attention to data that
indicate that action is required. A KPI must be set up to show where data
falls within a specified range, so if a value falls below or above a threshold,
the visual element utilizes color coding to draw attention to that value, like
we showed in Sect.
9.2
. Typically, red is used to show when performance
has fallen below a target, green indicates good performance, and yellow can
be used to show that no action is required. If multiple KPIs are used in a
dashboard, the color coding must be used consistently for the different KPIs,
so a user does not have to go through the extra work of decoding color codes
for KPIs that have the same meaning. For example, we must use the same
shade of red for all KPIs on a dashboard that show if a measure is performing
below a threshold.
We must avoid to include distracting tools in a dashboard, like motion
and animations. Also, using too many colors, or colors that are too bright, is
distracting and must be avoided. Dashboard visualization should be easy to
interpret and self-explanatory. Thus, only important text (like graph titles,
category labels, or data values) should be placed on the dashboard. While a
dashboard may have a small area, text should not be made so small that it
is dicult to read. A good way to test readability is through test users.
9.3.3 Dashboards in Reporting Services
In this section, we illustrate how we can use Microsoft Reporting Services for
building a dashboard for the Northwind company.
Reporting Services is a server-based reporting platform that provides
reporting functionality for a wide range of data sources. The three main
components of the Microsoft Reporting Services architecture are the client,
the report server, and the report databases. The SQL Server Data Tools
is typically used as the client. The report server is responsible to take a
client's request to render a report or to perform a management request. The
server performs functions like authentication, report and data processing,
report rendering, scheduling, and delivery. Finally, there are three databases
in the Reporting Services architecture: the two Reporting Services databases,
denoted
ReportServer
and
ReportServerTempDB
, and the data source. The
latter is the origin of the data that will populate the reports and can
correspond to various providers, like SQL Server and Oracle databases, or
XML, ODBC, and OLE DB data providers; the former store metadata about
the reports.
Reporting Services provides many objects that can be included in a
dashboard. These include various chart types, report objects like gauges
(typically used with KPIs), images (for embedding standard images, such
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