Table of Contents


 

Overview

SQL Server Reporting Services provides a full range of ready-to-use tools and services to help you create, deploy, and manage reports for your organization, as well as programming features that enable you to extend and customize your reporting functionality.

Reporting Services is a server-based reporting platform that provides comprehensive reporting functionality for a variety of data sources. Reporting Services includes a complete set of tools for you to create, manage, and deliver reports, and APIs that enable developers to integrate or extend data and report processing in custom applications. Reporting Services tools work within the Microsoft Visual Studio environment and are fully integrated with SQL Server tools and components.

With Reporting Services, you can create interactive, tabular, graphical, or free-form reports from relational, multidimensional, or XML-based data sources. Reports can include rich data visualization, including charts, maps, and sparklines. You can publish reports, schedule report processing, or access reports on-demand. You can select from a variety of viewing formats, export reports to other applications such as Microsoft Excel, and subscribe to published reports. The reports that you create can be viewed over a Web-based connection or as part of a Microsoft Windows application or SharePoint site. You can also create data alerts on reports published to a SharePoint site and receive email messages when report data changes.

Power View

In SQL Server 2012, Reporting Services introduces Power View, an interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience for the Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition. Power View is a browser-based Silverlight application, launched from SharePoint Server 2010. It provides access to data represented by tabular models based on PowerPivot workbooks published in a PowerPivot Gallery or tabular models deployed to SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services (SSAS) instances. For more information about Power View, see Power View (SSRS).

In Power View, a feature of SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition, you can quickly create a variety of visualizations, from tables and matrices to bubble charts and sets of small multiple charts. For every visualization you want to create, you start with a table, which you can then easily convert to other visualizations, to determine which one best illustrates your data. To create a table, you click a table or field in the field list, or you drag a field from the field list to the view. Power View draws the table in the view, displaying your actual data and automatically adding column headings. You do not insert an empty table in the view and then add data to it. As you select more fields, they are added to the table in the view. See Data Visualizations in Power View.

Visualizations include:

Other Reporting Options

In Report Designer, after you create tables, charts, and other report items in a project, you can publish them as report parts to a report server or SharePoint site integrated with a report server so that you and others can reuse them in other reports. See Report Parts in Report Designer.
 
Report Builder is a report authoring environment for business users who prefer to work in the Microsoft Office environment. When you design a report, you specify where to get the data, which data to get, and how to display the data. When you run the report, the report processor takes all the information you have specified, retrieves the data, and combines it with the report layout to generate the report. See Report Builder (SSRS).

Download Report Builder.

See Also