As I discussed last week in part 1 of this article, color can be used to highlight common elements across groups. As promised, here's the necessary code to achieve this effect in Reporting Services 2005 (or you can download the finished report here): 1. Create a new report, and add a query. I've used AdventureWorks and a simple query that returns employees and years of service: --get employees by Department, with years of service from AdventureWorks SELECT TOP 50 D.[Name] AS [DepartmentName], EMP.[EmployeeId], C.[FirstName] + ' ' + C.[LastName] AS [EmployeeName], ...

Often a report must be able to be grouped by one or more categories, depending on the user's requirements. Sometimes, across groups, it's helpful to highlight common elements. Imagine that the illustration below lists employees by department (the main grouping), with the last column being a common element to all employees: It's difficult to identify common elements across the main group for the last column in figure 1, even though values like "AAAAA" and "ZZZZZ" are repeated. In fact, it's not possible to draw any conclusions about the last column (like how many employees share the common element "ZZZZZ") without physically scanning...

UPDATE: Ola has moved his site to http://ola.hallengren.com - please check there for the latest versions of his IndexOptimise (and other) scripts). Ola Hallengren recently posted an all-in-one solution for backups, integrity checks and index optimisation for SQL Server 2005 and 2008 here (http://blog.ola.hallengren.com/blog/_archives/2008/1/1/3440068.html). I'm particularly interested in Ola's extremely flexible index optimisation stored procedure, IndexOptimise (you also need his CommandExecute and DatabaseSelect scripts to run it). By default, IndexOptimise rebuilds indexes with fragmentation over 30%, re-organises indexes with fragmentation between 5% and 30%, and ignores indexes with fragmentation under 5% or smaller than a configurable size. The level of configurability offered improves...