The difference between drill down and drill through reports.

During the design of reports and dashboards I have seen that a lot of people do not know the difference between drill down and drill through reports. In most situations people uses the term: Drill down for both situations. However, there is a difference between these reports.

Drill through reports:
A drill through report allows you to go from summary to detail. For instance: You have a financial application in which you can show the balance and profit and loss for a specific time frame. Every general ledger displays the total amount of all transactions for this specific period. By clicking (Drill through) on one of the general ledgers you will see the underlying transactions for this specific period.

Drill down reports:
A drill down reports allows you to look to the data in different levels. For instance, a report displays information on Country level if we drill down the report displays information on state level. Next drill down will display information on city level. So Countries contains States, States contains Cities. So we can view all levels through drill down.
Another examples is Year contains Months, Months contains Weeks, Weeks contains Days, Days contains Hours, Hours contains Minutes.

Picture: My drill down from the Kawarau Bridge, New Zealand Dec 2011

How to drilldown on a reporting server map report in SQL 2008 R2?

In my previous blogpost I described the maps as one of the nice new features of SQL 2008 R2 Reporting Server. These maps can easily be added to your reports if you have a dataset with geography data. In my blogpost: How to enrich your account data with latitude, longitude and geography data? you can add geography data to your dataset. Adding a map in your report for your dataset with geopgraphy data is simple to do. However drilldown or zoom functionality is more difficult to use. This blogpost will explain how you can create maps with drilldown functionality.

The Reporting map control make use of Bing maps which automatically centers and zooms in to the locations of your dataset. To drilldown or zoom we need to start the same report with a smaller dataset. To create a smaller dataset I make use of the data awareness of the reporting map control. When I click on a map point the values of the map point will be used to make the dataset smaller. I created a stored procedure with some parameters. These parameters gets their values from the data awareness of the reporting map control. The stored procedure will drilldown from World, Continent, Country, State to City. I have a table with accounts. Every account has their Countrycode, Statecode and City. I used a Join to the continents table in which every country in the world is linked to a continent. Please download the stored procedure from this location.

1. Create the stored procedure in your database.
2. Create a new report
3. Create a new dataset and select the stored procedure: LocContinentCountryStateCityMap
   






4. Report parameters are automatically added to the reports based on the content of the stored procedure: LocContinentCountryStateCityMap.
   
   
   
   Configure all 4 parameters as Hidden and allow NULL values.
   Configure Default value (NULL) for all 4 parameters.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. Drag the Map report item to your report. The new map layer wizard is started.
   







6. Select SQL Server spatial data.
7. The wizard will display all datasets with spatial data in it. In this example the resultset of the stored procedure.
   
   
   
   
   
   
8. Select this dataset and press Next.
9. Now you get an error: Unable to determine the spatial data type due to connection error. This is correct because the stored procedure need some parameter values which are not known by the wizard. Press OK.
10. Mark Add a Bing Maps Layer and select a Tile Type: Road.
    Select Layer Type: Point
    
    
    
    
    
    
11. Press Next and select the Basic Marker Map.
12. Press Finish.
13. Now, we have a map with the spatial data and are ready to configure the drilldown functionality.
14. Drilldown will make use of the data awareness of the reporting map control. Click on a map point and right click with your mouse. Select Point properties. If you get Viewport Properties, you have not select the map point.
15. Select Action.
    Go to report: Specify the report you are making. Add the 4 parameters to this report action.
    
    
    
    
    
    This means the report will start the same report. However with other parameter values. These parameter values are added one by one after every drill down in the stored procedure.
    
    Now the report is ready to run and drill down.
    Enjoy it.