Reporting Services Planned for SQL Server

A managed reporting add-on for SQL Server will go into beta in the first half of 2003. This product, tentatively called Reporting Services, will give software vendors and corporate developers native support in SQL Server for designing and generating human-readable reports from databases and data warehouses, and distributing these reports to large numbers of users on an ongoing basis. This move will affect the Microsoft partners who have provided managed reporting on SQL Server up to now, particularly those offering relatively simple reporting engines or horizontal reporting offerings with little application- or industry-specific logic.

Why Organizations Use Managed Reporting

Databases are useless unless users can extract the information they need in human-readable form. One way to do this is to extract it into electronic or printed documents called reports. These reports present data in formatted and organized ways, displaying only relevant or useful information, often grouped by categories and ordered in some way, such as alphabetically or by calculated values like “Total Sales.”