What is BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio)

I often see that simple question in forums and some people get confused over it, so I'll try to shed some light about it.

BIDS stands for (Business intelligence development studio) it's a small subset of Microsoft's Visual Studio product, using the visual studio 2005,2008, or 2010 shell based on your SQL server installation version.

Comes for free as part of your SQL server installation. As it's not the full Microsoft Visual Studio Product, it only allows you to develop business intelligence solutions (BI) for SQL server, such as Reporting services (SSRS), integration services (SSIS), and Analysis Services (SSAS).

In SQL 2012 it is not called BIDS any more, it is yes using the Visual Studio 2010 shell, but now it is called SQL Server Data Tools, or SSDT for short.

Where is it in my computer? 

SQL 2008 R2

BIDS 2008

SQL 2012

SQL Server Data Tools - SSDT in SQL Server 2012

Hope that helps someone....

More about it? Check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173767.aspx

SSRS Date time format conversions

Hi, Today's problem is someone has a date field coming out of his source and has no control to convert it to any other format, it's coming as  MM-DD-YYYY. and want it to be displayed in YYYY-MM-DD.

So I beleive that's how it could be done...

The easy way.....

=Format( Fields!BadDate.Value ,"yyyy-MM-dd")  --If the data type is DATE

=Format(CDATE( Fields!BadDate.Value ),"yyyy-MM-dd") --If the data type is String

The hard way.....

=Year(CDATE(Fields!BadDate.Value))&"-"&Month(CDATE(Fields!BadDate.Value))&"-"&Day(CDATE(Fields!BadDate.Value))


Another scenario when you need to display only the Month Name and the year, which happens and needed a lot...

So if you date is 5/3/2012, and you need to display May 2012, you would use:


The easy way.....

=Format( Fields!BadDate.Value ,"MMM yyyy")
Or the hard way.....
=MonthName(Month(Fields!BadDate.Value )) &" " & Year(Fields!BadDate.Value )

Various SSRS conversions:

Expression	Results
FormatDateTime(Fields!BadDate.Value,1)	Thursday, May 3, 2012
FormatDateTime(Fields!BadDate.Value,2)	5/3/2012
FormatDateTime(Fields!BadDate.Value,3)	12:00:00 AM
FormatDateTime(Fields!BadDate.Value,4)	00:00

Hope that helps someone...

Certification study group for 70-433 Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Database Development.

70-433 is the Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Database Development exam code, basically it is the necessarily basic skills for any database professional. 

If you are a database administrator, developer or a business intelligence developer, you will need to master these basic skills to understand queries and how the basic T-SQL language is all about.


So you are invited to join the SQL 70-433 Developer track study group, If you're studying for the 70-433 or need to be a SQL developer or even if you need to contribute to our study group.
Each week a new topic will be hosted by a community member, a link and a discussion will be opened for that topic.


Please download the "Skills being measured by topic Cheat Sheet" LINK
We'll be using the MCTS 70-433 "Self-paced Training Kit" book from Microsoft Press, the book could be purchased from LINK


Also we'll be using the Adventure Works database for SQL server 2008, throughout the demos and examples, it could be downloaded free from LINK

70-433 Study Group

Visit this group

To host a topic, please send me an E-mail or a tweet and let me know which topic you're interested in. The rules are so simple:

• You need to know what you are talking about!
• You need to be an active blogger and active in the community.
• You need to join the group above and be able to own your topic and handle the discussion and questions. 
• You need to use the above logo and add a link back to this topic, you may download it from https://www.box.com/s/6f311e81845c1bbc33da.

 Please remeber this is a basic intro level to all the covered topics, and uhh! it's all free and a way of our commetment to the SQL community.