Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Reporting with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

Chapter 1. An Introduction to SQL Server Reporting Services

If you have been doing web application development or design for any amount of time, you have almost assuredly been asked to create reports. Maybe you have created dashboard reports that show very high-level snapshots of productivity or other key measures. Perhaps you have created drill-down employee utilization reports so that managers can see how employees are spending the majority of their time. Or maybe Human Resources has needed to create summary reports for annual performance reviews. Whatever the reason, as a developer, creating data reports has probably been required of you.

To this end, you have many options. You can obviously create a custom reporting solution using something like C# and its related controls to provide the intended information. And depending on the size and requirements of the data, this might be a very attractive solution.

However, what if the report features a large amount of data spanned over an extensive amount of time? And what if management wants drill-down capabilities or, even worse, graphical representations such as charts and graphs? While it is certainly possible to accomplish this in C#, it also adds a level of complexity that many developers either do not want to deal with or, quite frankly, do not have the time to deal with.

To address this need, several server-side reporting technologies have been introduced over the years. If you have been in the developer community long enough, ...