Chapter 15: On ReportDelivering Business Intelligence with Reporting Services

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
—Samuel Johnson

Overview

In the preceding chapters of this book, we discovered ways to create Business Intelligence (BI). We saw how OLAP cubes and data mining algorithms dissect and analyze data. The result of this dissection and analysis is the foundational and feedback information needed for business intelligence.

Creating this information is only half the battle. As we discussed in Chapter 1, delivering business intelligence to decision makers in a timely manner is as important as creating that intelligence in the first place. The name of this book begins with the word "delivering" for just that reason.

Beginning with this chapter and through to the end of the book, we now examine the tools provided by SQL Server 2005 for delivering business intelligence. In this chapter, we learn to use the many capabilities of Reporting Services. In Chapter 16, we work at ways to integrate business intelligence with other applications. Finally, in Chapter 17, we review other Microsoft tools that put business intelligence into the hands of decision makers.