Reporting Services - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 924

Ad-Hoc Reports using Report Builder
You have so far learned to create reports using Report Designer from relation-
al and multi-dimensional databases. However these reports are pre-defined
and often business users want to modify reports to better understand the data.
Business users are most likely not used to understanding the underlying data
sources and the query languages to retrieve data and design their reports.
Most of them do understand entities and relationships between entities since
they analyze data. Reporting Services 2005 provides Report Builder for the
business users to explore the business data in a timely way and to make ef-
fective decisions. Report Builder exposes the business data through a model
called report model and translates users' actions into appropriate queries to re-
trieve the underlying data source.
Report Builder is a Winforms application that is accessed from the Report
Server for centralized management. Users can create reports using Report
Builder through simple drag and drop of entities that are exposed through the
report model. The reports generated by Report Builder are published to Report
Server using the Report Definition Language (RDL).
Report Model
A report model is a metadata description of data objects and the relationships
between the data in the underlying data source. Report models expose the
data objects and relationships from the data sources as entities and relation-
ships logically grouped together. Also, note that the entities and relationships
are easier to understand than the underlying data source objects for business
users. A report designer or a report server administrator would typically create
a report model using a report model project in BIDS or SSMS and deploy it to
the Report Server. These report models can then be accessed through the Re-
port Builder application by business users.
You can create report models from relational and multi-dimensional databases.
The report model consists of three objects — the semantic model, the physical
model, and the mapping between the semantic model and physical model. The
semantic model is the end users' view of the data which is defined using the
Semantic Model Description Language (SMDL). The physical model is the
physical representation of the objects such as cubes, dimension, levels, meas-
ures, etc. The mapping between the semantic model and physical model is