Reviews
Review: SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services
- By Mike Gunderloy
- February 25, 2004
SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services
licensed with SQL Server
Microsoft
Redmond, Washington
www.microsoft.com
I don't know whether they were fed up with third-party alternatives, in
need of new features, or what, but the Microsoft SQL Server team has
jumped into the Web-based reporting fray. SQL Server 2000 Reporting
Services is an add-on for current SQL Server installations (it will be
packaged with new copies of SQL Server later this year). Before you
decide whether it makes sense to look at Reporting Services for your
application, you need to understand the licensing just a bit (see the
licensing FAQ page for the
details). Reporting Services is licensed with SQL Server. That means if
you want to run the whole thing on a server where you already have a SQL
Server installation, you're covered. If you want to split it off to a
different server to save load, you're in for the full cost of SQL
Server, which is substantial. And the Reporting Services database will
not work with MSDE; you need the full product.
To design a report for Reporting Services, you use a special Visual
Studio .NET project (so count a Visual Studio .NET license into your
pricing comparison). The designer is reasonably simple, and handles
expressions and grouping with no particular problem. You can also import
reports from Access databases, but there are some limits on this (not
all Access features are supported, and you can't import just a single
report), which limits the usefulness of this feature. After you create
the report, by whatever means, you publish it to a report server for
general use.
After reports are published, you can use Report Manager (a Web-based
application) to manage them. You can change data sources (from a test
server to a live server, for example), edit security credentials, and
schedule reports to be refreshed on a schedule rather than run on
demand. You can also create subscriptions that automatically deliver
updated reports via e-mail or file share, which is a nice touch.
Splitting out this sort of DBA report task from normal report
development fits well with the way many SQL Server shops are organized.
There are a bunch of extensibility points built into the whole thing.
You can, for example, manage a report server via SOAP, or create custom
rendering components for your reports using .NET. Compared with some
other products this is a very open architecture. On the output side,
although the reports start in a browser they're not trapped there; it's
easy to get TIFF, PDF, Excel, XML, HTML with Office Web Components, or
other useful formats from any report.
Overall, it's pretty easy to get started using Reporting Services (I had
a mystery failure to install on my first test box, but that one was old
and full of cruft; it installed easily on a fresh computer). And the
overall approach does offer a lot of power and scalability. But the
licensing requirements will give some shops pause, and there are the
usual version 1 fit-and-finish issues here (I found two errors in the
first tutorial, for example). But if
you're doing reporting from SQL Server data, you ought to grab a copy
of the evaluation version and have a look.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy has been developing software for a quarter-century now, and writing about it for nearly as long. He walked away from a .NET development career in 2006 and has been a happy Rails user ever since. Mike blogs at A Fresh Cup.