Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

20.6. Ad-Hoc Reports Using Report Builder

You have so far learned to create reports using Report Designer from relational and multidimensional databases. However, these reports are pre-defined and often business users want to modify reports to better understand the data. Business users are most likely not used to understanding the underlying data sources and the query languages to retrieve data and design their reports. Most of them do understand entities and relationships between entities because they analyze data. Reporting Services 2008 provides Report Builder 2.0 as a feature pack that can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com. Report Builder is for the business users to explore the data in a timely way and to make effective decisions. Report Builder 2.0 exposes the business data through a model called the report model and translates users' actions into appropriate queries to retrieve the underlying data source.

Report Builder is a Winforms application that is accessed from the Report Server for centralized management. Users can create reports using Report Builder through simple drag and drop of entities that are exposed through the report model. The reports generated by Report Builder are published to Report Server using the Report Definition Language (RDL).

20.6.1. Report Model

A report model is a metadata description of data objects and the relationships between the data in the underlying data source. Report models expose the data objects and relationships from the data ...