Building a Multi-table Report with SQL 2005 Reporting Services

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If you want to learn how to generate a multi-table report using Microsoft's SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), you've come to the right place. This article will use data from two of the tables in the Northwind database on the SQL 2005 server for demonstration purposes.

Introduction

For an enterprise to succeed accurate and timely business decisions are important, whether they be for asset management, competition assessment, campaign scheduling or any other type of activity. As a consequence business reporting software constitutes an important part of the business software suite. There are a large number of vendors catering to a variety of reporting needs that may range from MS Excel and include such well known names as Business Objects, Cognos, MicroStrategy, Actuate and a host of others.

Beginning with VS 2003, Microsoft started adding its own reporting software, better known as SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) into its latest version of Visual Studio 2005. SSRS addresses some of the challenges in enterprise reporting, namely real-time access to data, data security, integrated data access, extensibility for reporting, deployment options that range from hard-copy, report servers to web services, and so on.

This tutorial shows you how you can generate a multi-table report using the SSRS which accesses data on your SQL 2005 Server. .NET 2.0 makes this task extremely easy with data access using its .NET data providers, drag and drop features, superior server controls, an in-situ query builder tool, and tight integration with the web server for deployment.

The data behind the report uses two of the tables in the Northwind database on the SQL 2005 Server. The business intelligence project through its Reporting Services template accesses the data and prepares it in the design environment of Visual Studio, which is later deployed on the web server. The tutorial uses the Visual Studio 2005 IIS 5.1 server on a Windows XP Professional Media Center OS.

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