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Chapter 17: Reporting for Duty, Sir! A Look At Reporting Services
Reporting Ser vices 101
Odds are that you’ve already generated some reports in your day. They may have been paper reports off
a printer (perhaps in something as rudimentary as Access’s reporting area — which is actually one of the
best parts of Access to me). They may have been off a rather robust reporting engine such as Crystal Reports.
Even if you haven’t used tools that fancy, one can argue that handing your boss the printout from a stored
procedure is essentially a very simple (and not necessarily nice looking) report — I would tend to agree
with that argument.
The reality, however, is that our managers and coworkers today expect something more. This is where
Reporting Services comes in. Reporting Services really has two different varieties of operation:
❑ Report Models: This is making use of a relatively simple, web-driven interface that is meant to
allow end users to create their own simple reports.
❑ Reports generated in Visual Studio: While this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to write
code (you can actually create simple reports using drag-and-drop functionality — something
we’ll do in this chapter as an example — you can design fairly robust reports.
Note that, while your users can eventually access these reports from the same Reporting Services Web
host, they are based on somewhat different architectures (and, as you will see, are created in much different
fashions).
In addition, Reporting Services provides features for pre-generating reports (handy if the queries that
underlie the report take a while to run) as well as distributing the report via e-mail.
Building Simple Repor t Models
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To create a simple model, start by opening the Business Intelligence Studio.
Note that this is entirely different from the SQL Server Management Studio that we’ve been working
with thus far. The Business Intelligence Studio is a different work area that is highly developer- (rather
than administrator-) focused; indeed, it is a form of Visual Studio that just has project templates oriented
around many of the “extra” services that SQL Server offers. In addition to the work we’ll do with
the Business Intelligence Studio in this chapter, we will also visit it some to work with Integration Services
in Chapter 18.
Choose File ➪ New Project, and you should bring up the dialog shown in Figure 17-1.
Choose an appropriate name (I’ve gone with the rather descript ReportModelProject), and click OK. This will
bring you to what should look like an everyday, run-of-the-mill Visual Studio development environment.
Note that the exact appearance of the dialog shown in Figure 17-1 may vary somewhat
depending on whether you have Visual Studio installed and, if so, which specific
languages and templates you’ve installed. The image is of the most generic
SQL Server–only installation.