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.
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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.
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.
