Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) has been around for over 8 years. It was introduced in 2004 as an add-on for SQL Server 2000 because it was feature complete, but the SQL Server team was having issues launching the rest of “Yukon”. Incidentally, Yukon was the codename for what would become SQL Server 2005. As soon as the webcast for the initial release of SSRS finished, I started downloading the bits and planning our development environment for its inclusion.
I must admit, I personally didn’t do much at all with SSRS until well after 2005 was available. I was first tasked to create a scaled out environment with two native mode SSRS portals. Shortly after I was tasked with taking some user requirements, some design elements and building a bunch of reports. This was actually a lot of fun. They wanted me to do some investigation of Best Practices and document the ones we used for the reports. It was an opportunity that you rarely get – to actually plan before delivering reports! I was working with someone who’d spend quite a bit of time with SSRS, Chris McGuigan (a.k.a. mister.magoo on SSC). Unfortunately, Chris was being pulled away from his passion of SSRS, and into Middle Management. So Scott got to play in the sand box. I also have the pleasure of working with Report Builder 1.0 report models and building a few solutions that were really eye popping for the users. But, I digress…
Back to my purpose…
I am starting to do some more work with SSRS in 2008 R2 and 2012, and I want to revisit some of the sites that I’ve perused in the past, and I am welcoming new suggestions too. So anything focused on Lessons Learned, Best Practices, Design Ideas… Screencast are great, but equally good are articles and blogs. I’d like to construct a drop zone for others to leverage what we’ve found.
So…
CALL TO ACTION: If you have some favourite SSRS Resources, please add a comment below and help an old guy out, and the rest of the community too!
Cheers,
Scott
Here is one of my all time favourites!
SSW Rules to Better SQL Reporting Services- Koen Verbeeck (@Ko_Ver) recommends his colleague Valentino Vranken’s (@ValentinoV42) blog articles on SSRS
- MSDN: Report Design Tips (Report Builder and SSRS)