Does a SSRS Forum exist & What's your opinion of SSRS?

[DietSquirt]

We're just embarking on a Data Warehouse project and must learn quickly about the capabilities/shortcomings of Reporting Services. Although there are a few mentions of SSRS scattered throughout Tek-Tips, I don't see a forum devoted to the topic. Thus my two questions:
1. Anyone know of a SSRS forum that would be useful to browse?
2. What is you take on SSRS as a reporting tool, how does it compare with others you've used.
Your input would be much appreciated.
Thanks!

 

[RiverGuy]

1. There is a forum on this site. forum1462
2. SSRS is a decent reporting tool for a data warehouse. It's tailored towards web page delivery and may not look as document-like as Crystal Reports.
It has a similar look and feel to the Business Objects web viewer.
It can connect to both relational data sources and SSAS, which could come in handy in a data warehousing project. However, if you want a true interactive OLAP tool, you will have to look at something else.
The automatic report delivery and scheduling is decent.
The custom logic/formulas used in building reports is pretty good as you can basically use Visual Basic.

I can't think of any glaring features it lacks or does extremely poorly on, although someone else may have more input on that.

 

[DietSquirt]

Thanks for your input. I'm not a programmer but wanted to know more about the usability of the report creation side of it.

I've been working with it (microsoft's tutorials) for a couple weeks now and find it difficult, in spite of many years designing reports with Crystal and Access. My problem is not with the data tab as I can write SQL, but with the Layout and preview.

It doesn't seem to have the features I'm accustomed to - for example in preview you can't see or select the report objects or sections (group, detail, etc.)It's nice in Crystal for example, to tweak an object in preview and see the results. The groups in preview are useful to show where a problem is. In the formula builder I can see the fields returned by my SQL code, but the parameters and group formulas aren't available for selection. I haven't created a formula to see if they're available in the formula builder. If I type them in they seem to work, but spoiled me would rather click them!

As usual we're required to implement a data warehouse without additional staff so I sure hope the tools don't take twice as long to use.