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Microsoft Reporting Services in Action - Chapter 1

by Teo Lachev

Introducing Microsoft Reporting Services
So much information, so little time ... the character “Poison Ivy” would likely say if the Batman saga was taking place in today’s enterprise.

We all know that the dot.com boom is history and so are the lavish IT budgets. In the doldrums of the economic recovery, organizations tend to spend their money on streamlining internal processes to gain a competitive advantage. According to Microsoft, today’s information workers spend as much as 80 percent of their time gathering information, with only 20 percent left to analyze it and make a decision. In many organizations, such requests consume significant IT and development resources. Too often, Excel spreadsheets are the prevalent reporting tools today and manual data entry or “pencil-pushing” is among the top reasons for inaccurate data and wrong decisions. Aware of these issues, Microsoft initiated the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services project at the beginning of the new millennium, with a bold vision to “enable employees at all levels of an organization to realize the promise of Business Intelligence to promote better decision making.”

This chapter provides a panoramic view of Reporting Services (RS). Throughout the rest of this book I will use the terms Reporting Services and RS interchangeably. You will see

Why RS is such a compelling choice for enterprise reporting
The main parts of the RS architecture
The report-generation process and report lifecycle
The steps for creating your first RS report