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Point me in right direction

  • January 5, 2006 at 2:24 am

    #170463

    Can someone point me in the right direction.  I have been using SQL for over 3 years but have never used Reporting serives or Data Analysis.  We have a database containing Company names and addresses, with employee sizes, turnover, business type etc.  And need to look at the data to determine what information is there and determmin and trends etc.  then to produce a report of the data.

    I assume this is what Data Analysis & reporting is for?

    I will also need to do this on other databases, although the structure will be very similar.

    Regards

     

    Andy.

  • January 6, 2006 at 4:46 am

    #613160

    I wish someone had answered this question 3 weeks ago

    OK, you have two main elements you might need for this.

    ReportServer is for creating reports. You can specify data sources directly into it is you want and just create adhoc reports on whatever. Bizarrely enough it is far easier to get an Oracle connection than an SQL Server connection running (?). It is essentially just crystal reports and it hasn't done anything particularly impressive for me yet. You can define data sources to any database for your reports (this is option one for a multiple db scenario). This requires IIS to work - this is how it distributes the reports themselves. The security is a bit of a pain in the backside, you'll just have to mess with it for a couple of days (I can't help you - mine is working but I'm still not sure exactly how)

    However, the reporting templates look like a powerful bit of kit - this allows you to define data structures available to the end user so they can create their own reports - the limitation on this is that one report model can only use one data source, so essentially it is about as much use as a chocolate teapot for multi-db reporting.

    If like me you have multiple databases but you need to offer a single reporting model to the end user (for example to compare multiple production sites) then you need to use SSIS (integration services), which is a pretty pricey bit of kit. This is a good thing indeed.

    These elements are accessible through the business development studio - there are some reasonable tutorials to walk you through it - make sure you install the adventureworks db. 

    The Data Analysis part is more about data warehousing, which you're not going to need unless you have huge amounts of data and want to perform silly transforms on it - sounds like your requirements are a little less esoteric.

    Let me know how you get on - possibly you'll catch up with me soon.

    Rich

  • January 6, 2006 at 4:59 am

    #613163

    Thanks for your reply, i will give the adventureworks DB and tutorials a go and see how i get on.

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