Report Model Designer NEW in 2005

Report Model Designer ^{NEW in 2005}

The Report Model Designer generates report models for use by Report Builder. A model abstracts complexities of an underlying data; for example, a model allows mapping names of tables and columns to business terms that an end user can easily understand.

The Report Model Designer is hosted in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS for short) or Visual Studio and is intended for use by developers. Actually, BIDS is a Visual Studio shell with only Business Intelligence projects and no language projects. One of the Business Intelligence projects is the Report Model Project, which launches the Report Model Designer and allows developers to create models.

In this release, models and, therefore, ad hoc reports can only work with SQL Server data sources: SQL Server database engine and SQL Server Analysis Services. However, developers can work around this limitation and access other data sources by using link servers or Analysis Services Unified Data Model. Both provide a thin layer of abstraction and allow access to any OLE DB- or ODBC-compliant data source including Oracle.