Reporting Services' reliance on XML and .NET-based data technologies provides a flexible architecture, creating the foundation for another interesting Reporting Services feature: letting one report "piggyback" on another. For example, the Show Yearly Sales report contains annual sales data, but you might want to have another report that lists quarterly sales. With Reporting Services, you could use the data set output of the yearly report as the data set input for the quarterly report. And role- and user-based permissions let you horizontally and vertically partition the data in a report so that multiple people can use the same report and see only the data they're supposed to.
Report delivery. With Reporting Services, you'll be able to define a report independent of how you want to render it. Reporting Services lets you easily create a single report that you can deploy in almost any format (including PDF, TIFF, HTML, and data formats such as XML or CSV) for almost any device.
Existing reporting solutions support a pull model, in which the report consumer initiates the process of running the report. However, you can also deliver Reporting Services reports through a push model, in which an administrator initiates a report or a specified event triggers the report.
You can build static reports, or you can build interactive reports that let users drill down into the data or re-sort it, even if the report is disconnected from the original data source. Reporting Services' interactive features use standard Web-based technologies such as HTML, HTTP, and SOAP protocols that you'd typically use to develop Web applications. In fact, the Reporting Services demos I've seen blur the line between traditional reporting functions and application development. For example, how many applications have you seen in which the Web page is simply a container for showing tabular or graphical data of some type? Reporting Services can easily become a development environment for applications that need to display data in tabular and visual formats.
Filling a need. More than one excited reader contacted me about how to get into the Reporting Services beta program after I wrote about the new product in SQL Server Magazine UPDATE ("Reporting Services Quietly Develops," May 8, 2003, InstantDoc ID 38983). And 89 percent of the 333 people who responded to an Instant Poll in that issue of UPDATE said they were interested in the new product, as Figure 1 shows. (You can apply for the public beta, expected in August, at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/betanominations.asp.)
Daniel Reber of Datamasters, Inc., a Pennsylvania company that designs, develops, implements, and supports healthcare software, said that Datamasters is looking at Reporting Services to enhance its current report-delivery system. "We believe that a reporting solution tightly integrated with SQL Server could lead to major performance gains for our report-delivery system," he explained. "Depending on the sophistication of the event-based [push] delivery, we may also replace our current alert functionality. Because we're planning to integrate with SharePoint in the near future, Reporting Services could give us a big head start."
Every SQL Server shop will need to reevaluate its current reporting strategies to see whether the Reporting Services tool suite will provide more functionality for less money than existing third-party tools.
Many organizations that are looking for a managed reporting solution might choose Reporting Services even if their underlying data isn't stored in SQL Server (although you'll need a SQL Server 2000 license to use Reporting Services). This scenario has been common in the extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) and OLAP spaces, where SQL Server's Data Transformation Services (DTS) and Analysis Services have become important offerings in their own right, apart from SQL Server.
Reporting Services' rich features across the entire reporting life cycle, coupled with the aggressive pricing that Microsoft is sure to set, will create an offering that could profoundly affect the way corporate and noncorporate individuals receive the reports they use daily. (As of press time, Microsoft hadn't released pricing or packaging details; for the latest Reporting Services information, see http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/bi/reportingservices.asp.) With the launch of Reporting Services, SQL Server will become the only major relational database management system (RDBMS) to include a rich, managed reporting environment as a core part of the platform. Even if you don't like or use Microsoft database technology, you'll eventually benefit from the release of Reporting Services as Oracle and IBM are forced to follow suit and give their customers the value of integrated reporting capabilities.