We had a great presentation on SQL Server Reporting services at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group given by Cem Demircioglu (Hirzel Canning Company) on March 28th. This is a product that I have been wanting to experiment with for a while now, and after seeing the presentation I can think of some great applications for it.
A few take aways:
- I thought it was very interesting how you can easily extend SQL Reporting services to generate any type of output. Out of the box it supports Excel, CSV, PDF and some others.
- The charting capabilities look really nice. There are a ton of great charting features and very easy to manipulate.
- You can integrate 3rd party objects to obtain data. The presentation that we saw had a 3rd party DLL (I beleive it was written in C++) that ran and returned data that was then integrated into a report. In this particular demonstration, it was a forecasting model that ran.
- Not bad for a v1 product. It looks like MS is planning to contine and improve SQL Reporting Services in the Yukon version.
Visit an article on MSDN's SQL Reporting Services for more information and a good overview for developers.