The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

Chapter 9. Building the BI Application in Reporting Services

Building a bridge for those who don't want to swim

Every user of your DW/BI system will access it through BI applications and especially standard reports. The vast majority of those users—typically between 70 and 90 percent—will use only standard reports. To them, the standard reports are the DW/BI system. After working through the database design, ETL system requirements, and OLAP database design, creating reports seems easy. If your designs are driven by business imperatives, creating reports is the fun part where all that work finally pays off.

Reporting Services is Microsoft's offering for enterprise reporting. It was first released in January 2004 and has moved through a couple of development iterations since then. Reporting Services has been well received by the Microsoft customer base and has been successfully implemented in many large organizations. Given its reasonable level of functionality and its more than reasonable incremental cost, we expect that a large percentage of folks reading this book will choose Reporting Services as the delivery vehicle for their standard reports and analytic applications.

This chapter provides the basic information you need to build your initial set of standard reports. We start with an exploration of general business requirements for standard reporting and the architectural implications of those business requirements. We then examine the Reporting Services architecture to see ...