Looking for guidance with reporting in Business Intelligence Development Studio

Question

I've been using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio for multiple manual SQL queries for Excel reports up until this point. I'd now like to automate my processes further with Microsoft Business Intelligence Development Studio and generate reports using this rather than Excel.

Here's a rough overview of what I'm looking to do:

• Combine multiple data sources including SQL Server and Excel data
• Generate a report using this combined data
• Re-use this report in the future with different criteria and Excel data. While the SQL Server data sources would remain the same, Excel data would change for every report run.

My access to the SQL servers is read-only. I'm not an administrator on the PC I have access to due to tight security.

I've played around with both SSIS packages and reports, but am not quite sure where to begin. I did create an SSIS package that combines the SQL server and Excel data using a Merge Join transformation, but am not quite sure what to do with the created package or if that package can even be used in a report.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Since you have BIDS, you have various options to send data to your users:

• Create reports in SSRS
• Export the SSRS report to Excel
• Create SSIS packages to export CSV files that are read by Excel (I used this model to mimic the report data caching ability of SSRS)

The SQL Server Reporting Services book is a great place to start.

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Server-2005-Reporting-Services/dp/0735622507