Can SQL's built-in reporting tools remove need for costly
third-party software?
On hearing the term "report" many business and IT people think
first of the end product - the report - then the report writer
where it was created, followed by the report server that delivered
it, and finally the tool that administers the report server.
Reporting Services, an add-on to Microsoft SQL Server, would be
most appropriate for large-scale enterprise reporting, where
thousands of reports are managed and distributed to thousands of
consumers.
As well as the challenge of producing thousands of reports, IT
managers in large organisations have to cope with the problems of
storing and managing a repository of thousands of reports and
distributing them to thousands of users in the format and on the
schedules required by individual consumers.
Reporting Services provides an infrastructure for information
delivery that addresses the problems of report storage, management
and distribution that other suppliers have neglected.
Since Reporting Services runs on top of SQL Server, it has the
potential to be more scalable than similar platforms from other
business intelligence suppliers.
Reporting Services includes components for all these pieces of the
enterprise reporting technology stack in the form of Report Server
Database, where reports are stored; Report Designer, where they are
created; Report Server, which delivers the reports; and Report
Manager, which administers Report Server.
Given the high number of users and reports involved in enterprise
reporting, scalability is a key requirement.
Horror stories abound about user organisations that tried and
failed to achieve enterprise reporting with Olap-based business
intelligence platforms. When the number of concurrent users is
high, even platforms constructed specifically for enterprise
reporting have trouble scaling up. SQL Server is a mature,
multi-threaded database management system with proven scalability
in transactional and decision support environments.
Since Reporting Services can use SQL Server's scalability, its
prospects are good for scaling up to large deployments of
enterprise reporting.
With the licensing structure Microsoft has adopted, Reporting
Services on top of SQL Server may also prove to be cost-effective,
offering relatively good performance at a low price. Reporting
Services is not exactly free, because it requires a licence for SQL
Server 2000. Using Report Designer also requires a licence for
Visual Studio .net 2003.
In some cases, a user organisation may be able to co-locate
Reporting Services with a pre-existing SQL Server licence, which
would entail no additional licensing cost.
However, it seems likely that, given the demanding environment of
true enterprise reporting, most organisations will want a separate
hardware server running an additional SQL Server licence and
Reporting Services to distribute processing load for the sake of
performance and scalability.
Even with this configuration, the low cost of SQL Server licences
amounts to a fraction of the licence cost of report servers from
suppliers such as Actuate and Crystal Decisions.
IT organisations that must deploy enterprise reporting on a budget
yet want to minimise the risk of failing to scale up should
evaluate Reporting Services. Although the server components are
promising, the catch is that Report Designer may not satisfy the
desires of experienced IT professionals.
Report Designer is good for grouped reports in a banded report
design environment, but the application is not yet up to ambitious
report styles such as heavily visual and personalised dashboards.
But help is at hand - several third-party report writers can
already output reports in Report Definition Language (RDL), which
Reporting Services requires to manage and distribute them.
As more business intelligence suppliers support Microsoft's RDL,
Reporting Services will be able to fulfil its role as a
cost-effective and scalable infrastructure for information
delivery, while third-party products satisfy unique requirements
for report creation in various styles.
As such, the first release of Microsoft Reporting Services should
provide a strong infrastructure for server-based report storage,
management and distribution. Although it downplays the role of
report writing.
Philip Russom and Keith Gile are analysts at
Forrester Research
www.forrester.com