Advantage to using SQL Server Reporting Services? [closed]

Question

What advantage is there to using SQL Server Reporting Services instead of just using normal reporting through the application ?

I can understand that the data is on the SQL Server so perhaps this is a good place to serve the report from but what are the actual advantages in practice and is it worth converting your app to use Reporting Services?

Answer 1

As usual, it depends :-) If your application purpose is only to serve reports based on data from SQL Server 2005/2008 database, then using reporting services could give you this without a need to develop anything (maybe beside creating report definitions).

So what is given by reporting services:

• reports designer (quite easy to use),
• it could handle user authentication and authorization,
• report subscriptions,
• exporting reports to various formats (xls, csv, pdf).

This is only excerpt from full functionality of SSRS. I have used them only a little and quite a long time ago, so I could have forgotten something. As I remember MS prepared report viewer controls, which were usable in ASP.NET web sites and windows forms applications.

Additionally to what you have written in question- as far as I remember reporting services do not need to be installed on same server machine as SQL Server.

If reporting is only minor feature of your application and you have only few specified and already implemented reports, then maybe there is no need to use SSRS.

To summarize, in my opinion main advantages of Sql Server Reporting Services are:

• they fullfill most reporting needs without need to develop all those features,
• they allow to create easily new reports,
• they fit very well into MS environment and integrate easily with it.