I do appreciate the author having presented this article in such a straightforward style..Clearly explained, great examples, and so on. Nicely done.

I'll probably take some heat for this (pardon the pun) but, for the life of me, I cannot figure out why companies would continue to use SSRS. It takes so long to create simple things that, frankly, are much much easier to do with other tools. Given the amount of time and complexity needed to do basic BI things, it seems to negate the cost savings and delay realization of BI's value in the organization. I realize you can code alot of custom things in SSRS, but if you have to create a custom class and write code to support something as simple as this heatmap example, I believe you are using the wrong BI tools. This takes literally 2 minutes in any data discovery platform...no coding needed.

Probably just stirred up trouble. I have always been a SQL Server guy from a DW-perspective and always wanted SSRS to be a true contender in the BI space. I just have never really seen it, nevermind what Gartner says.