Reporting Services - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 878

Overview
Microsoft first introduced Reporting Services in January of 2004 under the title
SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services. Since that time it has become an award-
winning product (see Intelligent Enterprise Reader's Choice award for Ad Hoc
Query & Reporting, 2004). More importantly, Reporting Services has become
critical to many business intelligence suite implementations. Face it, reporting
is the centerpiece for consumption of business intelligence information. Sure,
doing the number crunching and actual decision-making are important and not
reporting related per se, but you will want to cover all the bases and complete
the job right. And to accomplish that you can even do better than just create
tabular reports; you can create charts that show the results in a much more ap-
pealing and easy-to-understand fashion. Related to that is the ability to embed
your own custom static graphics in your reports, like your company logo, for
example. Some companies out there integrate seamlessly with Reporting Ser-
vices to provide additional enhancements beyond those described here; one
such company is Panorama Software ( http://www.panorama.com/ ) , whose
products provide drag-and-drop placement of report objects in reports for use
against Reporting Services.
Even after all the cool integration discussed in the Integration Services
chapter, you will see that what you are about to read here is similarly cool, if
not blatantly hip. Not only can reports be built by dragging and dropping data
objects onto a canvas with SQL subsequently generated behind the scenes,
but you can also drag and drop Analysis Services-specific objects, like dimen-
sions and calculated members, onto that same canvas with MDX subsequently
generated behind the scenes. Using the report designer you can design re-
ports from relational as well as multidimensional databases. Indeed, you get to
use a highly integrated business intelligence reporting infrastructure that re-
quires little more than drag-and-drop techniques to create reports.
In an effort to realize the great techniques just discussed, you learn to do the
following things in this chapter: how to create a report on top of a relational
database, deploy that report to the reports server, and then browse it locally or
over your corpnet. You learn to create a report using an Analysis Services
database from the report wizard, and further enhance your Analysis Services
reporting skills by creating calculated members and using specific properties
within a report. You also learn to create charts in reports for better representa-