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SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Ready for Prime Time
After years of development, Yukon is almost here. For those unfamiliar with the code name, let me decode for you: Microsoft will release SQL Server 2005 later this year. This new database engine is filled with features, many of which I'm sure you've already heard about. If I tried to tackle all of them here, I'd probably use up several mb of space. So instead, I'm going to focus on one aspect of Yukon that will really blow your BI socks off - Reporting Services.
Reporting Services, a server-based reporting tool that produces transactional and business intelligence reports, is a key component of SQL Server 2005. First released with SQL Server 2000, Reporting Services provided customers with an enterprise-capable reporting platform that has a comprehensive environment for authoring, managing, and delivering reports to the entire organization. Yes, there were limitations with 2000's Reporting Services. The good news is that Microsoft gathered your input and made some major upgrades to the 2005 version.
If you go to the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 web page, you'll read that Reporting Services provides:
- A high performance engine for processing and formatting reports.
- A complete set of tools for creating, managing, and viewing reports.
- An extensible architecture and open interfaces for embedding reports or integrating reporting solutions in diverse Information Technology environments.
It's a nice summary, but the bottom line is that the enhancements to SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services will empower your information workers and give your entire enterprise a competitive edge.
Tom Rizzo, Microsoft group product manager for SQL Server, has said that, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services "can compete with Crystal. It can compete with Cognos. It can compete with anyone out there." From what I've seen, I agree.
Let me break it down for you, starting with 2005's marquee feature, Report Builder. Report Builder is a user-friendly tool that will let business users build ad hoc reports from scratch and share them with others, as well as explore corporate data. Based on technology Microsoft acquired when it bought ActiveViews last April, Report Builder gives Reporting Services what it needs to compete with products from Business Objects, Hyperion Solutions, and other industry leaders. A simple point-and-click, drag-and-drop environment facilitates report design and customization and puts the power of information into the hands of those in your organization who need it most.
But the upgrades only start with Report Builder. You'll also see improvements in the areas of report design, processing, and interactivity, as well as performance and scalability.
- You can directly route print jobs, which means you'll no longer have to export a report to a printable format (PDF, TIFF, or Excel) before sending it to the printer.
- You can add the ability for the viewer of a published report to resort the data within the report. They won't need to re-execute the database queries, so it will work on snapshot and cached reports. The feature also includes support for multicolumn sorting and sorting within nested or grouped data.
- A report author can now specify any parameter to be multi-valued. In SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, a report parameter could only be defined to allow the user to enter a single value. For example, if you had a parameter named "color" it could only be "red" or "blue".
- Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and developers can now extend report processing through the creation of custom report items, such as gauges, barcodes, maps, etc.
- Visual Studio no longer has to be preinstalled on a workstation to use Report Designer. Report Designer itself has several upgrades, including an improved expression editor, which now includes a list of functions available to report designers, as well as IntelliSense features, like inline parameter information, statement completion, and real-time syntax checking.
Another key improvement of Reporting Services with 2005 is enhanced integration with other components within SQL Server. It also has tighter integration with Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, enabling reports to easily participate in corporate portal scenarios.
- The Visual Studio Report Designer includes an integrated query designer for SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services that allows you to construct queries by dragging and dropping server metadata and previewing results. The Analysis Services query builder also includes the ability to filter the results and easy parameterization of MDX queries.
- In addition to still managing Reporting Services through the Web-based Report Manager, 2005 also lets you configure and manage deployment through the Windows-based SQL Server Management Studio, which gives you a single point of management for all SQL Server components, including the relational database, Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services.
- 2005 includes a set of Web Parts that make it easy to integrate reports into your SharePoint Portal Server 2003 or Windows SharePoint Services environment. Now you can browse the Report Server folder hierarchy; view a report and create or edit a subscription to a report; view and navigate multipage reports; and export to supported formats.
Lastly, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services provides unparalleled reporting integration into the Visual Studio development environment to enable developers to integrate rich reports into their applications, both with and without a Report Server. Report design is now completely integrated with Visual Studio language projects. You can embed reports directly in any Windows Forms or ASP.NET Web application. In addition to using traditional databases as a source of data for your reports, you can also use object collections.
Put it all together - the addition of Report Builder and the multitude of improvements in nearly every component of Reporting Services - and you've got a Business Intelligence tool that's value is much higher than its price tag.
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