BANGALORE, INDIA: One of the current trends in Business Intelligence is the digital dashboard. The dashboard on a car tells the driver the current state of the car's operations: current speed, current amount of gas in the tank, etc. A digital dashboard tells a decision maker the current state of the business. You can use many of the features provided in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to prepare your digital dashboard. An interesting new feature in SQL Server 2008 is the gauge data region, which we will be exploring here.

We shall discuss an example of using the gauge data region for a digital dashboard. For the example over here I am using the AdventureWorks2008 database, which can be downloaded from http://www.codeplex.com/. Let's discuss the various steps involved.

Creating the project

Here, you start the Business Intelligence Development Studio, an IDE based on MS Visual Studio for developing BI solutions.

Click on the Create Project link as highlighted above.