What does Reporting Services do?

Question

What does Reporting Services do?

Andrew Collins

Ten Centuries

Points: 1369
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November 13, 2005 at 11:23 am

#112282

I regularly produce counts and breakdowns based on our data and customers data. This data consists of company names, address, employee size, company description, turnover etc,etc.
The breakdowns i produced use the group by function on these various fields, also produce reports on the number of duplicates etc.
Is the reporting services something i could use to produce these, or any suggestions as to any way reporting services(or other sql) i could use to enhance my reports and data analysis.

Thanks

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CJohnson-232084 Default port Points: 1492 More actions · Answer 1

If you (or other users) want perform more analysis work on the data, you may want to distribute the results of your queries in Excel. This allows the recipient to 'slice and dice' the data in ways meaningful to them.

Andrew Collins Ten Centuries Points: 1369 More actions · Answer 2

thanks for your reply, I currrently get the reults and cut and paste into excel, and the sales guy formats it to how he wants to present it. I thought it might be nice to produce all the data in one go in a presentable format.

david russell-253790 SSCarpal Tunnel Points: 4042 More actions · Answer 3

Reporting Services is just a tool. If you have reports that you get through cut and paste and functions in Excel and you are satisfied with having what you need and do not mind the effort it sounds to me like you are just fine.

I have worked the spectrum from the slow response of government to the quick response of the dot.com and I understand that not everybody needs more tools.

For the last eight years or so it has become almost painfully obvious that the DBA cannot give the users the reports they want or need. You could go to almost any marketing or sales organization and ask them what they need - and if they were able to respond and they could give you a list of twelve reports they absolutely "had to have", you could propose giving them one a week for the next twelve weeks, work your tail off doing your job AND these reports, and at the end of twelve weeks they would need twelve completely different reports.

There is only one solution that I have found - and the search of a tool to fit that solution has been long, hard, and sometimes expensive.

Give the users the tools they need, tools that they can understand, so that they can create the reports they need. This means getting rid of a highly normalized relational database with 240 tables (and perhaps no referential integrity). This means getting rid of cumbersome products that require detailed formatting and expert knowledge requirements.

This means... MAKE IT SIMPLE!

Does Reporting Services do this? I am guessing it is not there yet; but it sure looks to be a step in the right direction.

Cheers,

david russell