Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Reporting Services

Chapter 10. Report Solution Patterns and Recipes

This chapter serves as a practical guide to designing reports and building reporting solutions in the real world. It contains a few examples of advanced and creative report designs as recipes to solve specific business problems. This is a high-level guide and not step-by-step instructions. You will use the techniques you've learned in the previous chapters to implement specific functionality. Specifically, this chapter covers the following topics:

• Reporting project guidelines, key success factors, and the solution scope

• Defining and managing report specifications and the development process phases

• Migrating and converting reports from other reporting tools

• Working with the strengths and limitations of the Reporting Services architecture

• Recipes and models for several advanced reporting features and techniques

In the previous chapters, you've learned what you can do with Reporting Services, and you have been given several options to implement various report functionality. The last edition of this book provided a chapter that offered practical guidance for designing reports based on real-world experience. This chapter takes a different approach to introducing report development patterns by focusing not on what you can do but what you should do. Over the past three years, I have spent the majority of my professional time building reporting solutions for consulting clients. Collectively, we've developed reporting solutions for a very large ...