RSinteract Positioning within the Microsoft SQL Server BI stack

The Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence stack consists of the following major components:

• DTS / Integration Services – provides access to data from different data sources, and allows extract, transform and load of disparate data into a data warehouse if required.
• SQL Server Data Warehouse – provides a scaleable repository for operational and aggregated data needed for analysis and decision support.
• Analysis Services – allows sophisticated aggregation of data into multi-dimensional cubes for further analysis.
• Reporting Services – allows data to be queried and constructed into reports for use by the business.

The Reporting Services piece of the BI stack is the most important element for delivery of information to the masses – handling construction and distribution of reports to internal users, business partners and customers. RSinteract is an essential value-add piece within Reporting Services as shown by the following diagram:

BI for the Masses with Reporting Services

All three means of report production – RSinteract, Report Builder and Report Designer (Visual Studio) - are useful in different contexts, as follows:

Ideal usage:

a) Rapid building of new highly interactive sophisticated reports.
b) Dynamic interaction with existing reports for ad-hoc changes and manipulation.
c) Rapid creation of new and different reports directly from existing reports.

RSinteract is a zero footprint fully web-based interactive tool for business users to build and manipulate Reporting Services reports on both relational data (SQL Server and Oracle) and Analysis Services / UDM cubes. It requires no download or installation of client software, instead using the ASP.NET AJAX Framework to offer the end user a richness of experience only possible previously from fat clients. It is not necessary to set up a semantic data layer to build reports from data sources (including Oracle), although use of the UDM is supported today, and Report Builder Report Models will be supported in future releases. The product allows business users to build, interact with and manipulate reports, without requiring the use of a separate report editor to make amendments. Many different report types (list table, summary table, matrix, chart) are available in any combinations with virtually no formatting restrictions. All functionality is available via a single intuitive WYSIWYGI (“What You See is What You’ve Got Instantly”) web interface. The slight amendment to this well known acronym is vitally important – if the end user experience when making changes and manipulating information is not instant it is also not truly intuitive, ad-hoc or interactive. This is one of the main benefits RSinteract provides over and above Report Designer and Report Builder.

The beneficiaries of RSinteract are split into two main areas:

• Business users who need to work with information in an intuitive and familiar way to reflect their ever changing decision support and analysis requirements.
• Information professionals who are tasked with providing large amounts of information for decision support and analysis to the business, and need to be able to respond quickly to ever changing business requirements.

Report Builder (SQL Server 2005 only)

Ideal usage: rapid building (from restricted templates) of simple reports that require little interaction by the end user.

Required personnel to operate: Technically proficient information professionals within the organisation

Report Builder is a “smart client” that must be downloaded to the end user’s machine in order to allow him or her to build and edit Reporting Services reports. This is not a truly interactive mechanism for business users to interact with reports – however it is a useful tool to help information professionals to build simple reports without using Visual Studio. Report Builder only allows the creation of reports if a semantic data model is built first, which is proprietary to the product and not based on the Universal Dimensional Model offered with SQL Server 2005. There are some restrictions on the type of reports that can be produced using Report Builder, for instance detail list reports are not possible and multiple reports cannot be presented simultaneously.

Report Designer (using Visual Studio)

Ideal usage: production of very rich formatted end of line reports that require little or no interaction by the end user, where time pressures on report production are not intense.

Required personnel to operate: Software developers

Report Designer within Visual Studio is a full development environment which can be used by experienced software engineers to construct rich reports using the powerful services offered by Reporting Services. Reports must be built from scratch by highly technical people.