Summary

Delivering a set of high-value standard reports is a major component of the DW/BI teams responsibilities. These reports are the primary interface to the DW/BI system for a large majority of the user community. In this chapter, we explored the viability of Reporting Services as the platform for developing the standard report set.

The basic business requirements for reporting include creating, finding, viewing, and changing reports. You need a solid, reliable reporting system foundation to support these requirements. With this broad set of requirements in place, we examined the Reporting Services architecture to see what functions it provides to meet these needs. This gave you a good sense for the components of the tool and how those components fit together. Comparing the Reporting Services architecture to the business requirements for reporting, we concluded that Reporting Services has a reasonable feature-cost ratio, especially considering its incremental cost.

With this understanding in place, the next section focused on actually creating a report in the Reporting Services development environment. Start with some preparation steps to get the development environment set up and to create a standard template that serves as a starting point for every new standard report. Next , revisit the standard report prioritization list, specifications, and mock-ups that you captured as part of the requirements gathering process early on in the Lifecycle. We walked through a case study that picked the top-priority report from the list and dove into the development process.

Development involves setting up the data source and writing the queries that feed the data into the report. Next, put together the report layout. The initial report display is quick, but tweaking the content and formatting takes more time and energy than the uninitiated might imagine.

After youve unit tested the report in the development environment, deploy it to the production server and test it in the real world. In large DW/BI environments, testing on a test server that mirrors the production server is a prudent step.

Delivering the reports is only half of delivering the information. The DW/BI team needs to provide a navigation framework to help users find the reports they need. You can build this framework using standard web tools, a web portal system like Windows SharePoint Services, or using the portal capabilities of a third-party BI tool.

The standard reports are a critical part of the DW/BI system, but they take a fair amount of work to build and maintain. The DW/BI team must plan for that work on an ongoing basis, as we describe in Chapter 15.