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

9.3. Summary

Delivering a set of high-value standard reports is a major component of the DW/BI team's responsibilities. These reports are the primary interface to the DW/BI system for a large majority of the user community. In this chapter, we explored the viability of Reporting Services as the platform for developing the standard report set.

The basic business requirements for reporting include creating, finding, viewing, and changing reports. You need a solid, reliable reporting system foundation to support these requirements. With this broad set of requirements in place, we examined the Reporting Services architecture to see what functions it provides to meet these needs. This gave you a good sense for the components of the tool and how those components fit together. Comparing the Reporting Services architecture to the business requirements for reporting, we concluded that Reporting Services has a reasonable feature-cost ratio, especially considering its incremental cost.

With this understanding in place, the next section focused on actually creating a report in the Reporting Services development environment. Start with some preparation steps to get the development environment set up and to create a standard template that serves as a starting point for every new standard report. Next, revisit the standard report prioritization list, specifications, and mock-ups that you captured as part of the requirements gathering process early on in the Lifecycle. We walked through a case ...