Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Reviews

The use cases for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services are mainly for reporting purposes, to deploy reports. That's what we mainly use it for, allowing business end-users to navigate to the URL for the SSRS server and look at their daily reports and so forth, including report subscriptions, etc.

I wouldn't be responsible for creating the reports in Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, but more for deploying them and troubleshooting any issues that arise, so I couldn't say about creating reports.

Regarding parameterized reports, I think when you mention that, you're referring to whether the report calls stored procedures based on values that are passed at runtime, but I'm not sure if they do that.

As for the integration of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services with Visual Studio, I believe Visual Studio is what was used to look at the contents of the report, but I'm not involved in designing the reports, so I wouldn't be the best person to speak on that.

My issue is that Microsoft doesn't provide enough resources, as there are certifications for SQL Server, but there is no certification for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. This leaves me unsure about how to get more information on it outside of just reading blog posts, which I find to be more informative, often providing more solutions than the Microsoft website does.

Overall, I would rate Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services an eight. I had been trying to develop a solution using SSRS to view some data while allowing me to modify data and update the table in the back end, but it seems SSRS isn't the tool for that. The read-only aspect, maybe that's what it was designed to do, suggests I need to find another solution for my problem. It's a solid eight; it's not a bad tool, and I think I need more documentation on resource consumption to know how much to grant to SSRS as opposed to SQL Server.

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is not difficult to use, but my main issue is troubleshooting whenever there is any problem, as the logs can be unclear. Perhaps I don't have enough experience with the tool to know where exactly to look, but I do find troubleshooting to be the most challenging aspect; however, outside of that, it's a pretty solid tool, pretty straightforward, and I have no issues with it.

The initial setup for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is not an issue for me; however, I find it challenging when we want to secure the endpoint, such as using bindings and so forth, which may be due to my lack of knowledge.

The trial for SolarWinds was about two weeks, so it wasn't very long.

I have not reached out to tech support at Microsoft for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services because it is my job to know how to get this tool to work. I feel it wouldn't be more of a tech support issue but rather a need for me to do more research into the tool.

Neutral

Currently, I do not have experience with other database development or any other data products, as I am just using some open-source tools to get the job done.

One of the open-source tools I use is the Brent scripts, such as the Blitz and BlitzCache and all of those maintenance scripts he provides for troubleshooting and best practices. I think Brent Ozar is his name.

I use Microsoft SQL Server.

The last time I used SolarWinds was for a POC of the DPA, the Database Performance Analyzer, but I don't know if that counts.

The SQL I am familiar with is Microsoft SQL Server, so I am not familiar with Oracle SQL Developer.

I am somewhat familiar with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

I am not familiar with any other reporting service outside of Microsoft because I've only worked in Microsoft shops, so I'm only familiar with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services an eight.

My main use cases for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services include typical reports, such as financial reports and production reports, as well as different types of reports.

Our use case is satisfied for now, but we are exploring Power BI for the longer run.

The best features of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services are that it is easy to get the reports out because it is integrated with SQL and we have many of these tables. It is simple for business teams and function teams to use, and it is easy to create the reports and report formats, making it efficient.

From an accuracy point of view, and consistency and time taken to generate these reports, there is nothing that could be improved in this solution, as it's all within tolerable limits for what we do, so we are happy with that.

I am thinking that with all the Copilot integration within the Microsoft environment, that could be integrated as well, so that you could issue a prompt and it generates designs.

I have been working with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services for some four or five years as part of this company.

This solution supports different formats of reports, including PDF.

I haven't contacted Microsoft technical support because of this tool, but for some other things I have, and I found them quite lacking.

We had trouble with Azure Firewall, where we wanted logs from our VMs, but reaching out to Microsoft took a prolonged time to the extent that we were wondering why Microsoft was unable to get its own logs to us, which occurred a few months back.

I would rate Microsoft support around 6.5 to seven, as they don't directly interact with medium-sized MSMEs, always referring to their partners, so it differs based on the partner's level of relationship with Microsoft.

Positive

It was not difficult for me to initially set up and configure Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services; it was an easy process.

How much it can save in terms of time or money depends on the complexity, but any tool which obviates the need for a lot of coding will definitely save at least 60-70% of effort.

I would consider it cost effective for our environment, and we don't have to invest in another big tool to generate these reports, making it all integrated and easier. Otherwise, you need to write a lot of code or API calls to generate reports if using some other tool outside of the ecosystem, which definitely requires additional effort and therefore additional cost and time.

I do think our partners, to whom we outsource, would probably use the Report Designer, but our reports are not so complex. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services a 7.5.

I am responsible for administrating databases for close to a hundred different applications. Seven or eight of them actively use Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, although my role mainly involves ensuring access levels and monitoring the database system.

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services has been functional whenever I needed to use it. The resources I found for questions were at least satisfactory, if not overwhelming. There are some tools within SQL Server Studio for performing SQL analysis, either live or with a saved XML trace.

There are occasions during maintenance runs when the Check Point monitoring system reports a lot of blocked sessions. This is typically due to system processes or maintenance processes that temporarily block themselves. 

Additionally, a tool within the studio for performing SQL analysis does not provide useful information for batch load processes, often advising not to use an index, which is expected with batch loads.

I have been working with Microsoft SQL for about 15 months.

I do not experience any major downtimes or significantly problematic issues. However, the maintenance runs can cause some temporary blocked sessions.

Fortunately, I haven't encountered any serious issues and have not needed to contact Microsoft support.

Neutral

I am not sure about the licensing details, as it is managed by the applications and clients, and I do not handle it personally.

I would rate Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services a six out of ten. Although I have not used it extensively, when I have, it has at least worked adequately. The resources provided for it are satisfactory. On a scale of one to ten, I rate the overall solution as a six.

We use Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) for management dashboard and reporting purposes. It's useful for user reporting and administrative tasks like monitoring and checking progress.

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is reliable for management dashboard and reporting purposes. It is helpful for user reporting and administrative tasks, such as monitoring progress. It is easy to use since it is lightweight and integrates well with the SQL Server database, making reporting straightforward.

The visualization capabilities enhance our reporting needs with good pagination and KPI features. It integrates well with data servers and workbooks, allowing us to publish reports on mobile applications and tablets easily. Integrating other tools and platforms in our tech ecosystem is generally straightforward. However, if we need to perform something very specialized, we might have to use third-party tools rather than inbuilt options.

The complex tuning for report performance is complicated. There is a lack of native support for source code control. We often need to use separate tools like VS Code or other software to manage version control and changes in the database.

It would be beneficial if source code management were integrated directly into SSRS, thus eliminating the need to rely on external tools. While CLI-based operations are exemplary, the trend is towards GUI for a better user experience. Integrating both visualization and source code management within SSRS would simplify the process for users.

I have used Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services for five to seven years.

The solution is stable, though there are some variances we have to manage.

The scalability is satisfactory. We have about seven to ten end users in our company.

It is challenging to connect with the support team. Sometimes, it is easy, but other times, it cannot be easy. The support does not always meet our expectations.

Neutral

We haven't used similar solutions from other vendors for the same purpose, but we are moving towards Power BI.

One person can manage maintenance.

The ROI is around fifty per cent.

The pricing is high.

I'd rate SSRS an eight out of ten. I recommend it as it's a pretty good tool. For AI integration, we'restill in the sandbox testing phase.

The manual setup is a bigger benefit. It is easy to use and the interface is very friendly.

QL Server can support the customer language in the long term, so we can use another language to build some components.

I have been using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services for over twenty years, and we are using the latest version of the solution.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

One hundred instances use this solution. I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

We set up the installation for Microsoft SQL Server. We just needed to click one button for the patch process, and everything was completed.

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services should be okay if you're within the budget. We're just using open-source solutions if you're not within the budget. Sometimes, we use MySQL or something similar. It depends on the company's business needs. The pricing should be reasonable. Everything is higher for enterprise customers.

When we first initialized the product, we used SSRS. We have continued using it because changing it would cause significant issues for many developers and clients. Therefore, we always use SSRS because it is user-friendly and effective.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The standard reports provided by the product are very useful. While creating templates, like in the case of welcome letters, to help our company deal with its customers, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services can be very useful.

In Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, not much of the interface part is used. With Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, its users face issues with the interface after they use Excel or create Microsoft SSIS Packages. The tool's interface is an area of concern requiring improvement.

There needs to be an improvement in the product's connectivity so that the tool can connect easily with other third-party databases. In the dashboard, drag and drop functionality needs to improve, especially when compared to other tools like IBM Cognos Analytics and Qlik Sense.

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is useful only for standard reports. In IBM Cognos Analytics, query studio can be used by users to drag the data and simply download the reports, so the user doesn't need to have any technical knowledge like developers. Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is to be improved to offer features like query Studio, which is provided in IBM Cognos Analytics.

I have been using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services for 3 years. My previous company had a partnership with Microsoft.

Though it is a stable product, its functionalities have not improved much.

Scalability is possible for small-scale users of the product and not for enterprise-sized businesses.

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is not widely used by companies since it is a tool that is particularly used in a few departments.

In Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, the installation and configuration parts are easy.

I rate the product's installation phase a seven out of ten.

My company plans to move to IBM Cognos for better reports and dashboards.

Speaking about deploying and accessing reports with the help of the product, I would say that Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services can be easily installed and deployed. While working with reports using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, my company needed to write SQL queries in the background for prompts, while the interface interacting with reports was not comfortable enough for users, especially when compared with other BI tools. With Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, the standard reports are generated.

For real-time reporting and data analysis, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is used in 70 percent of our company, specifically in the collection and credit departments. The manager wants to separately analyze and freely move the data source so as to be able to find the solutions and ideas during the time owing to which they are not comfortable with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. My company's managers want a good interface like the one provided by Cognos Dynamic Cubes, and because of this, I think my company plans to move to IBM Cognos Analytics in the future.

On the reporting part, the dashboard attached to the tool's data visualization capability is not very interactive and doesn't offer multiple functionalities.

Though I am not sure about the subscription and delivery features in the tool, I know that sending emails and reports is a good part of the product. There is a separate set of people mainly handling the migration activities of reports.

One person is enough to maintain the tool.

It is not easy to integrate the product with other tools in the market. Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services integrates well with Microsoft tools. I have tried to integrate Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services with IBM Cognos TM1. I saw that fetching data was possible when moving to Cognos Dynamic Cubes, but I saw that some data sources, by default, show zero to all the dimension values, which is why my company had to use filters to remove the zeros. The aforementioned compatibility issues are present in the product.

Before choosing a product, people should have knowledge of reporting. People can use the product for standard reports but not for the analytics part.

I rate the tool a six out of ten.

In this solution, the cost should be reduced for the enterprise edition. Customers are looking for high availability for applications, but due to the high license cost, they may not agree. Microsoft should consider and think about the cost and licensing for the enterprise edition.

I have been working with this solution for a few weeks, I have worked on this. I was assigned to a project to work on it, and I got some tasks related to deployment and insertions. So, it was just useful for that.

I've been actively using SQL Server Reporting Services for the past year. I have worked with Microsoft SQL Server versions 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2019.

It is a stable solution. We don't use it daily. 

It is a highly scalable solution. We have around 3 to 5 end users for a single instance on-prem. 

I'm very satisfied with the service. And usually, whenever we have any issue or details, we get to the person for the support. I'm really satisfied with the service. Within a few minutes or within a few hours, the support person will be available. 

Positive

It's very friendly to use and also cost-optimized. It's easy to understand whatever we want to do, and it's also cost-effective and very user-friendly that this tool is as compared to Oracle and other databases.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

It took around when we were migrating one of our databases from on-prem to Azure. It took around the database size of around 650GB, and it took around three to four days to completely migrate it from on-prem.

We migrated from SQL Server 2016 to Azure SQL Database. 

The deployment time varies depending on the complexity of the changes involved. If the changes are minor, the deployment can be done quickly. However, if the changes are more significant, testing and confirmation from the customer are required before proceeding with the deployment.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I use it to create reports, specifically for SQL Server-based reporting. We use SQL Server Reporting Services in a medium-sized business environment within the government industry.

With SQL Server Reporting Services, I can create reports and printable reports, known as paginated reports. It's valuable since it allows me to create documentation using a template, which is difficult to achieve otherwise.

They could improve the scalability and stability of SQL Server Reporting Services. I haven't used it recently, so I can't provide detailed suggestions on improvements.

The stability of SQL Server Reporting Services is rated as seven out of ten. It could be improved further.

In terms of scalability, I would rate it a four out of ten, indicating there's room for improvement.

The customer service and support from Microsoft are good. I would rate it at seven point five out of ten. They are responsive and timely.

We now use Microsoft Power BI instead of SQL Server Reporting Services as it is more recent and versatile.

The initial setup is straightforward. If I had to rate it, with ten being the easiest, I would rate it a ten.

I don't recall the current pricing as it changes frequently.

I did not evaluate other solutions. Microsoft now offers Power BI, which we have switched to.

Currently, I would not recommend SQL Server Reporting Services since we switched to Power BI. Overall, I would rate SQL Server Reporting Services a six out of ten.

When the data source is Microsoft-related, like, Excel or Microsoft products in general, I prefer to use SSRS. The most important thing is I can export the data from different formats at the end. This is one of the main features we love of the SQL Server, SSRS.

There is room for improvement in the setup process. The setup is difficult because you have to install different servers. It's complicated because it stops working and does not have support. We don't have a version for Mac. We have some developers who use Mac, so it's hard to provide them with the product they have to use and the virtualization.

I use SSRS when I need to extract the data. So, I have never had a long-term experience with it, but whenever there is a database that I need to extract the data, I use SSRS.

Once it is working, it will be stable. But sometimes, the performance is a little bit slow when you have larger data sets, when the data is used.

It is scalable. So in terms of scalability, it is scalable as long as it is on a Microsoft platform.

The customer service and support are effective. 

Positive

I would rate the initial setup a seven out of ten in terms of the easiness of the softness of the setup.

Once we configure it, there are no changes in the data structure. Then it is easy to maintain. But if the customers are modifying or having new releases, then it is not easy to maintain. Also, it's not easy to document the setup of SSRS. You have to work or document that externally, and it requires writing the documentation. Some of the engineers who got the script or the network figured out but then they leave, you have to bring another one, and you have to walk them through all the steps to understand. It is not easy to document.

It is not expensive compared to other platforms. So, if ten was the most expensive product and one was the cheapest, I would rate the pricing of this product around seven out of ten.

If your data source is on Microsoft, then I would recommend using SSRS. If your data source is different, I would recommend that you have any kind of APIs or something before they connect to Microsoft.

Overall, I would rate Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services an eight out of ten. I think it will be fair.

It is mainly for creating and managing less complicated reports. We use it for ourselves and for the DBA team to get some insights into the operational health of the database environment. 

And a few other teams are using it for some simple application reporting purposes. So, it is a fairly small reporting environment, not a big one.

What I like is the ease of use of the application. It is easy to set it up and start working with it. The reporting capabilities are also quite flexible. It is easy to create reports and it is easy to mark up the reports, to format the reports. And also the export capabilities to export the reporting in various file formats.

I would like to see more integrations. 

I have been using it for two years now. 

I would rate it at nine out of ten because we haven't had issues with Reporting Services. The only issue I can think of is if we perform a software upgrade of the environment or of the reporting instances. 

Sometimes, in some scenarios, things can break because of new, more stringent security controls or new functionalities in the Server, and all functionalities get deprecated. But it is basically a matter of reviewing the release notes of the new software release and making sure that those criteria have been met.

I would rate the scalability an eight because it is easy to scale out to the environment to add multiple servers in a farm so that if one server goes down, the other takes over the workload. And also in order to balance a lot across the environment.

Sometimes, we need to make sure that the configuration stays consistent across the reporting instances. They all connect to the same database. So, it shares that same backend, but the reporting services itself can also be configured. On the application level, for reporting level. And it is, based on my own experience, it is a manual effort to make sure that the reporting servers are configured the same across the environment.

But that's a minor detail because it is easy to get an overview of the current configuration of one Server and make sure that those configuration parameters are configured on the other nodes as well.

We have roughly 20 end users using this solution. 

The initial setup is easy. It is on-premises.

A first deployment takes less than 30 minutes. If you have all the prerequisites for, like, the server, an empty database, or actually not an empty database, but if you have the server, a database server, those kinds of things, then 30 minutes.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Microsoft also has another solution called Power BI. Power BI is a bit more powerful, and it has more integration compared to Microsoft SQL.

So, if organizations are considering using SQL Reporting Services, then it is also wise to do a comparison between Reporting Services and the newer Microsoft Power BI solution.