Twenty-five years ago, people developed reports using an advanced programming language that usually ran on the mainframe. With the advent of the personal computer in 1982, it was possible to use a programming language called Basic to write some basic reports with formatting. In the mid-1980s, Microsoft Excel came along and many people began to use the formatting capabilities and developing reports directly in Excel. Since then, Excel has continued to be the preferred tool for reporting and analysis for financial analysts and accountants due to its ease of programming formulas and formatting capabilities.
Beginning in the 1990s, Microsoft began the development of a database management system called SQL Server. The early versions of SQL Server were clunky and the solution was not as popular as other database management solutions on the market. The first serious scalable version of SQL Server was SQL Server 7. In 2000, the SQL Server 2000 database was launched and until recently has been a scalable database system for developing enterprise solutions, especially for departments of large companies or mid market companies. The price of the software running on Windows was a compelling feature of this database product.
In the last few years, Microsoft began to expand its reach into reporting tools. Microsoft began developing Reporting Services. It was originally conceived to run as a Web service on top of a database in SQL Server 2000 and leverage the Web services – based architecture of the .NET framework. The design goals for the product were to include tight integration with Visual Studio .NET, leverage the overall extensibility of the framework, and offer a short learning curve to developing reports. In January 2004, Microsoft launched Reporting Services 2000 and offered it as a free download from their Web site. When it was launched, a Webcast was done to communicate the features of Reporting Services. This Webcast was the second most popular Microsoft Webcast ever, with 5,000-plus people viewing! Also, in just a short time, the number of downloads for Reporting Services outnumbered the number of known licenses of Crystal. This was a sweet spot in the marketplace. There was demand for an intuitive reporting tool that was an extension of a powerful database management system.
Then in April 2004, Microsoft acquired a company called ActiveViews. ActiveViews provides an ad hoc reporting system that takes advantage of the.NET framework and SQL Server Reporting Services to allow users to do ad hoc reporting within Reporting Services. Since then, Microsoft has been integrating the technology into Reporting Services to integrate and enhance the adhoc reporting capabilities within Reporting Services. This new component has been added to the Reporting Services 2005 product in the form of a tool called the Report Builder. It is now available in Reporting Services 2005.
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services For Beginner helps you explore all the capabilities of this exciting new reporting tool. This blog gives you the basics for all components of Reporting Services 2005. Although this blog doesn’t make you an expert at using all the features, it shows you how to use the key capabilities to produce some outstanding reporting solutions. It provides a great roadmap for exploring the key capabilities and gets you started on the path to mastering advanced features.
This blog is for you if you’re interested in developing reports from any database management system that runs in Windows (SQL Server, DB2, and Oracle), because there are tools in SQL Server that can integrate information from any of these other database management systems.
Because Reporting Services 2005 comes as part of SQL Server 2005 (no extra cost!), if your organization is using SQL Server as a Department of Enterprise Database solution, you should explore the capabilities of this exciting new tool as soon as you can. This blog is your quick-start guide to beginning to create powerful new reports that can help you easily unlock and explore data stored in myriad systems.
