When to use Microsoft Reporting Services

Question

These days I’m having a training in Microsoft Reporting Service. Although it’s a good tool but I can’t find any examples that using it will be useful. To me is always better implementing reports using c# code in combination of javascript controls. With C# and javascript maybe it will be necessary more work but in the other hand I will get better maintainability and better automatic tests. Is there any situation where using reporting services will be the best choice?

Answer 1

In my opinion Microsoft are not maintianing SSRS and will I believe be deprecating it. I have no citation for this, but have used it for 5 years and there has been little development on it in that period, and their launch of Azure reporting services was pulled immediately. Microsoft are heavily promoting the BI/Excel PowerView/Sharpeoint combination as the ad-hoc data enquiry tool of choice, but that doesn't cover the "printed banded report" use case that Reporting Services addressed.

The SQL emitted by the Reporting Model within SSRS is also very poorly performing.

In my opinion your initial misgivings are correct and I would not personally recommend its selection for a new system build. There aren't any directly comparable products which; 1) Have an HTML consumer AND designer user interface 2) Have a mediated data dictionary access to underlying data sources 3) Comply with custom permissions and authentication.

Consequently hand rolling reports in a MVH/HTML toolkit would also be my recommendation. User self-service reports seems to be an unaddressed areas of need. If you dont need user self-service, then just select your reporting toolkit of choice and go with that - if you do need user self-serivce then the choice of possible products is very thin indeed.

I'd be very interested if any other contributors have a different experience with SSRS and the target use-cased (user self-service, banded reporting, data dictionary driven, custom authentication and security).