Leveraging the published Project Server Reporting Database Schema

A key success to a Project Server deployment are meaningful reports and dashboards for everyone in the organization. Even though PS comes with standard reports; in order to meet your exact business needs you might have to create custom reports using products such as SQL Server Reporting Services (which by the way will have a new version that comes with the SQL 2008 release that contains great graphical indicators such as gauges due to acquisition of Dundas Data Visualization Inc.’s Data Visualization).

Regardless of the product used to build reports the bulk of the work requires a good understanding of the database schema, what entities to use (tables versus views) and the relationship between them. The Project Server 2007 Reporting database is fully published in the Software Development Kit. Another nugget contained in the SDK is a Visio file which diagrams of key database entities anyone who is building report should be aware.

The Visio document contains four pages:

• User Views
• Relationships
• Timesheet Tables (shown below)
• SharePoint Data