Now, if I select my server up here and right-click it, I can also look at Activity Monitor, and this is the standard stuff if you've ever worked with Activity Monitor in Server, or in Windows 7, Windows 8, then you've seen about the same thing. And the reason you might want to do that, perhaps you use different graphics rather than using the accursed pie chart maybe you use a column chart, et cetera. rdl extension, and then you can just import it and you've got it. But you can create your report, and it's saved as an XML Schema with a. It was a huge leap forward, and it really is robust and easy to work with, and users love it. If you haven't used Report Builder 3.0, that's really something you need to take a look at. So, you would use SQL Server Reporting Services to create a report or maybe Report Builder 3.0. And if I click Custom Reports in here, now you see I can import an rdl report. So SQL assumes that a report that I looked at I'll be interested in looking at again. I don't have any currently running transactions, but if I right-click here again and go down into Reports, you see whatever I picked is added down here.
Now let's look at something else, I'm going to right-click, Reports, Standard Reports, and we'll go with Top Transactions by Age. So I'm coming in and I'm looking at Disk Usage by Table, and I can see just that as I move down.
Now let's close everything, and close that so we don't confuse ourselves, I'm going to expand Databases, and here's our sample, AdventureWorks, and I'll right-click AdventureWorks, go into Reports, and you notice this, they want me to look at Disk Usage by Table, which ought to be a hint. I'm always connected here onto my local machines, just the way I'm doing that. It comes down here with my Connection ID which is a GUID, and my Session ID, so it comes through to show me that, and all the other information. But this shows me what's happening down here with my memory, and again, if I right-click and go into Reports, Standard Reports, and now I can look at the activities: All Blocking Transactions, or Dormant Sessions I'll go to Top Connections, and it pops up the 10 Oldest Connections. So, if I come through and I look at Memory Consumption, here's my top memory consumption, and recall that we're not doing anything, so this is not going to be representative of a standard database that we're actually coming through and doing work on. If I right-click again, and, again, go down to Reports, now I can go into Standard Reports and, you see, I have a lot of them. So, here's my Server Dashboard, and as you can see, if I move it on down, I have a number of different information and I'm really not doing anything on this server, so there's nothing much going on of interest here, it's just to show you that I do have this Server Dashboard. So what? Well, because it is an rdl extension, I can export it and import it into a number of other applications that support rdl, such as: if I have Sharepoint, and I want to create some kind of a Management Dashboard in Sharepoint, off of rdl type reports, within Sharepoint, I can go in and add rdl's into a Sharepoint web page and display them like that. rdl extension, and that means it's a XML Schema that is used by reporting services. So this is a handy little report all of these reports have the. So, up here, on the instances, I'm looking at my default instance, and I'm going to right-click in there, drill down and look at Reports, and what I'm going to look at, let's look at the Servers Dashboard report. Now, there's a number of tools that we look at perhaps one of the coolest is the concept of doing reports. And now, SQL Server Management Studio opens, and I want to connect into my default instance, and I'll just select "Connect". If you don't have it pinned, I just hit the Windows key, you'll just type SQL Server, and then, over here, we'll right-click it, and we'll say "run as administrator". If you encounter that, you want to do what I'm doing right here, and then right-click it again and run as administrator. Sometimes, depending on the permissions of the account that you have logged into, you will be prevented, in SQL Server Management Studio, from doing certain actions, even though you are an administrator. So, if you remember, I pinned SQL Server Management Studio to my taskbar, it's right down here, and I want to show you something you're going to right-click on it, and then I've got a number of options. Let's take a look at SQL Server Management Studio, which is a tool that DBAs spend a lot of time in.