Chapter 1

Introducing Reporting Services

What's in this chapter?

Understanding report designer roles and the tools used to design reports

Understanding dashboards, reports and applications

Examining Business Intelligence solutions

Discovering multidimensional and tabular semantic models

You're holding this book, trying to decide if it will help you solve a problem or teach you essential skills to create reports with Reporting Services. If you and I were having this conversation in person, I'd ask you to tell me what you need. I teach classes and travel to companies to create report and BI solutions, and at the beginning of every class or consulting engagement, I ask what the student or client needs. What are the requirements? What questions does your report need to answer? What's not working? What needs to be fixed, and what will it take to build a solution to help you reach your goals? So, I ask you, what do you need? Why are you reading a book about Reporting Services? Do you have a specific problem to resolve, or do you just need to develop some basic report design skills? Do you need to build an entire reporting solution? Who are the users of these reports? Are they department workers, business managers, or financial analysts? Maybe your user is the CEO of a major corporation or other business executives who need to know if the company is on the right track. Maybe you need to create reports for your own business to make sure it's profitable and achieving its goals. Whether ...

Get Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.