Excel OBDC connections versus SSRS reports

• jigging.tech

  Say Hey Kid

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  April 6, 2015 at 9:45 am

  #295786

  Hello all,

  I haven't done a lot of work with creating reports or comparing different reporting methods so I wanted to reach out to you all.

  I just started at a company, who has never had a DBA before, where all reports are Excel workbooks using ODBC connections to a SQL server 2012 instance.

  I feel like the company might benefit from using SSRS and generating reports through there instead of using Excel.

  I was wondering if anyone could give some advice on the following:

  - Scalability of SSRS VS Excel (we do not have the ability to use integrated SSRS with SharePoint at the moment)

  - Is it somewhat intuitive/easy to take the queries from Excel and create an SSRS report instead? (I'm assuming it is based on the few reports I've made but I hate to assume)

  - Should I see a performance improvement when multiple people are trying to access the same SSRS report VS multiple people trying to refresh the same excel workbook (the Excel files are kept on a file share so we usually have multiple people in the same file at once)

  Hopefully these are not too general of questions or too "this is just an opinion", but I'm really new into the world of SSRS/SSIS/SSAS.

  Oh, almost forgot, I am also going to be building a report environment (before me all reports ran against the Production instance) and am hoping to get a Data Warehouse started as well.

  Thanks in advance, even if it's just some articles so I can better understand the pro's and con's between the two.