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Reporting Services

To be successful in today's competitive marketplace, organizations must extend information beyond the walls of their organization and seamlessly interact with customers, partners, and suppliers in real time. Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services enables organizations to transform valuable enterprise data into shared information for insightful, timely decisions at a lower total cost of ownership.

Highlights

  • Reporting Services Features

    This list of features provides a guide to the functionality in Reporting Services that will help communicate enterprise data to your organization at all levels.

  • Reporting Services FAQ

    Find answers to frequently asked questions about SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.

  • Reporting Services Guided Tours

    Take a guided tour through Reporting Services. Learn more about why to choose Microsoft SQL Server 2005 as the product that delivers on rich and powerful business intelligence (BI) solutions.

  • Reporting Services Datasheet

    Get a quick overview of the features and benefits of SQL Server Reporting Services. These features help you create new types of reports such as scorecards, dashboards, and mobile reports.

  • Report Builder Datasheet

    Get an overview of the features and benefits provided by Report Builder, the new end user ad-hoc query tool in SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.

Transform valuable enterprise data into shared information

  • Advanced Report Authoring

    Leverage powerful design tools to author reports accommodating any reporting need. Empower every business user with interactive, personalized, and relevant reports or simply enable them to build their own reports.

  • Central Manageability

    Enjoy central manageability of the enterprise reporting platform. Handle all report management, processing, and delivery from one central location, providing increased consistency and improved performance throughout the reporting process. Take the Tour

  • Scalable, Enterprise-Wide Delivery

    Enable on-demand report delivery, deploy event-based report distribution, and directly embed reports in business applications. Automate effective delivery of real-time information that helps drive better business decisions for users across the entire enterprise. Take the Tour

Reporting Services Overview

SQL Server Reporting Services is a comprehensive, server-based solution that enables the creation, management, and delivery of both traditional, paper-oriented reports and interactive, Web-based reports. An integrated part of the Microsoft Business Intelligence framework, Reporting Services combines the data management capabilities of SQL Server and Microsoft Windows Server with familiar and powerful Microsoft Office System applications to deliver real-time information to support daily operations and drive decisions.

Read the Datasheet

  • An Integrated Architecture

    SQL Server Reporting Services supports a wide range of common data sources, such as OLE DB and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), as well as multiple output formats such as familiar Web browsers and Microsoft Office System applications. Using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework, developers can leverage the capabilities of their existing information systems and connect to custom data sources, produce additional output formats, and deliver to a variety of devices.

  • Full Reporting Life Cycle Support

    SQL Server Reporting Services supports the full reporting life cycle, including:

    • Report authoring. Report developers can create reports to be published to a report server by using Microsoft or other design tools that use Report Definition Language (RDL), an XML-based industry standard used to define reports.

    • Report management. Report definitions, folders, and resources are published and managed as a Web service. Managed reports can be executed either on demand or on a specified schedule, and are cached for consistency and performance. New in SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, administrators can use SQL Server Management Studio to organize reports and data sources, schedule report execution and delivery, and track reporting history.

    • Report delivery. SQL Server Reporting Services supports both on-demand (pull) and event-based (push) delivery of reports. Users can view reports in a Web-based format or in e-mail.

    • Report security. SQL Server Reporting Services implements a flexible, role-based security model to protect reports and reporting resources. The product includes extensible interfaces for integrating other security models as well.

  • Key Reporting Scenarios

    SQL Server Reporting Services combines a single, complete reporting platform with a scalable and extensible architecture to meet a wide variety of reporting needs, including:

    • Enterprise reporting. Enterprises can use Reporting Services for their operational reporting or business intelligence applications. Using Reporting Services, corporate IT staff can design a variety of reports and deploy them to individuals throughout the enterprise.

    • Ad-hoc reporting. SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services includes Report Builder, a new ad-hoc reporting tool that enables business users to create their own reports and explore corporate data. Report Builder incorporates a user-friendly business query model that enables users to build reports without deep technical understanding of the underlying data sources.

    • Embedded reporting. Organizations can access predefined or ad-hoc reports from third-party applications that use Reporting Services and use these reports as-is, customize them, or create new ones for specific business needs.

    • Web-based reporting for partners and customers. Organizations can deploy interactive Web-based reports to deliver information to customers or partners over extranets or the Internet. Reporting Services isolates report consumers from the complexity of the underlying data sources, while providing personalization and interactivity.

Learn more:   Read the Report Builder datasheet

New in Reporting Services

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2, designed to enable you to leverage the enhancements within Windows Vista and the 2007 Office system, is now available. In addition to enhancing your existing functionality, this release offers a rich set of new capabilities. New capabilities in Reporting Services provide enhanced interoperability, including native support for connecting to additional external data sources, such as Oracle and Hyperion, and delivery of reports through rich integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2005 – Interoperability with the 2007 Microsoft Office System

    Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 offers a wealth of new enhancements that will greatly impact organizations’ ability to deliver business insight where users want it. Read this white paper to learn about the new features available with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System--including Reporting Services integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007--as well as other enhancements offering optimized interoperability that allow organizations to deliver business insight to every information worker.

  • Using SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services with Hyperion Essbase

    Offering a complete enterprise reporting platform, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services aims to provide a solution for all your reporting needs--no matter where your data reside or where your users are located. Reporting Services now offers integration with Hyperion Essbase, simplifying the process of connecting to Hyperion System 9 to build high-quality reports directly against Hyperion Essbase data sources. This integration is available through a new Microsoft .NET Data Provider for Hyperion Essbase, delivered as part of Microsoft SQL Server SP2. Read this paper to learn more about the integration and how it can be used to build reports directly off Hyperion Essbase data sources.

Authoring, Designing, and Building with Reporting Services

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services includes everything you need to create traditional and interactive reports. Optimized to best serve each group of report stakeholders in the enterprise, the tools in Reporting Services allow organizations to accommodate any reporting need—all from a single reporting platform.

  • Enterprise Reporting

    Developers will benefit from the power of the SQL Server Business Intelligence development studio, a Microsoft Visual Studio–based development environment for designing even the most complex reports by using familiar design tools. This environment is optimized to enable advanced report designers to leverage a wealth of rich reporting capabilities. Features such as support for multiple data sources, dynamic end-user sorting, cascading, and multivalue parameters enable developers to create powerful reports with a high degree of personalization, and accommodate a broad range of audiences across the organization.

    Take the tour of SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio to learn how developers and IT professionals can leverage the SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Report Designer to build advanced reports and see how report controls can be used to easily embed reports into applications.

  • Ad-Hoc Reporting

    To extend the reach of Reporting Services within organizations, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services includes Report Builder, a new ad-hoc reporting tool that allows business users to create their own reports and explore corporate data. Report Builder’s user-friendly business query model lets end users build reports without a deep technical understanding of the underlying data sources.

    Take the tour of Report Builder, the end-user ad-hoc query tool for Reporting Services.

  • Embedded Reporting

    Delivered through Visual Studio 2005, Reporting Services offers a set of freely redistributable Report Viewer controls that make it easy to embed Reporting Services functionality in business applications. Using these controls, Reporting Services can be leveraged to deliver predefined or ad-hoc reports as part of a business application, making key reports easily accessible to end users in the context that is most relevant for them.

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