Home Forums Article Discussions Article Discussions by Author Discuss content posted by Andy Owl Report Builder or Reporting Services? RE: Report Builder or Reporting Services?

  • March 27, 2012 at 12:17 am

    #1464718

    Thanks this is a useful differentiation and would have helped me a few years back 🙂

    I'm sure you know these things but it might help someone new reading this:

    The visual studio environment is introduced as BIDS, and then refered to as SSRS in the rest of the article. The term SSRS really encompasses the whole product including the Reporting Services instance you would install as part of SQL Server, the Report Manager website, the ReportServer and ReportServerTemp databases.

    When you install BIDS as an extra from the SQL Server installation disk, you don't get the standard Visual Studio .NET language projects. This is important because BIDS doesn't require separate licensing. You've already paid for the SQL Server licenses so the BIDS tool is a free extra with no installation limitations, likewise the Report Builder tool that you download from the report manager website.

    If you install Visual Studio from Visual Studio disks, you don't get the Business Intelligence templates and need to install BIDS from the SQL Server disk. Various versions of Visual Studio will happily co-exist on the same machine.