the SSRS Enterprise

Problems with Report Builder

After using the Report builder for some time now, I think I have found a couple of problems that I hope can be addressed sooner rather than later.

Number 1 No support for Stored Procedures: This one shocked me to be honest, stored procedures have been at the heart of Microsoft's methodology for databases for so long, this almost smacks of them not expecting enterprise style clients to use this tool (I'm sure this isn't the case) Essentially my major gripe is that there is no way to include a stored procedure and prompt the user for the values to run it, as a part of the model. This means that only tables or views can be a part of the model and as such I cannot fulfill the requirements of the reporting system, quite a number of the pieces of information we present to clients are calculated fields and as such we need a stored procedure to calculate the values......

Number 2 One word... Performance: Performance is always an issue in reporting systems and I'm certain this is one area that will see plenty of attention from the development team in the coming months, essentially I think performance will be a problem... the means via which we can control the user's construction of a report leaves plenty of room for them to build monster queries that will bring down a server, the alternative being limiting the models to the point whereby they are nearly unuseable or forcing filters on table entities.... either way I think this is one area I think needs attention...

I think report builder is a wonderful product, my criticisms of it are minimal. I only hope microsoft commits to turning it into a great product!!!

posted by Thomo @ 8:51 PM