And In SQL Developers I am considering guys who also work in SSRS on daily basis. But still should have had done some R&D to know what R can give what SSRS can't give.
Strength of R is not in its graphics libraries, no matter how powerful they are.
Maybe not, but GGPlot in reports is pretty damn close. 🙂
Vivek: Being a T-SQL developer doesn't mean you only study SQL. You should have other tools in your toolbox, you should be at least familiar with R or Python, as well as Powershell or Bash (or other scripting/automation language) plus any other languages that are relevant for your areas of interest/work
Gail
I respect you highly and I hope we can agree that if Microsoft does not clean their act and do something really revolutionary, SSRS will be dead and GGPlot and other tools will take over. Over the last few years I have seen that my users no longer go for SSRS but download their data into Excel Pivot Tables. The typical scenario is that a biz analyst comes in the morning, starts a download, goes to get his/her cup of coffee, comes back, curses when s/he sees that the download has not finished yet (and blames me), waits a few more minutes and when the download finishes, works with the downloaded as-per-yesterday data for the rest of the day. Rinse and repeat. 😉
Due to the file size limitations, Power BI is not that popular.
Most of the BI-type people at my company (and there's no insult intended in that) use Tableau, Qlikview/Qliksense and other such tools for reporting and for the users to play with the data in. I can't remember the last time we recommended SSRS for anything other than simple operational reports. We've got some clients using PowerBI, not many.
I've switched most of my graphing from excel to R, just need to find the time to write some import/process/draw functions for the stuff that's still in Excel and they'll all be R (I do a lot of reports for clients, as in 20+ page Word docs with multiple graphs)
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
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