My most popular blog has been Visual Studio 2012 does not support BI. In short, this means VS 2012 does not support SSAS, SSIS, or SSRS. Well, not anymore! Just released is Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools – Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2012, or SSDT-BI or SSDTBI for short. If you have Visual Studio 2012 installed, this will add the Business Intelligence projects for Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services. If you don’t have Visual Studio 2012 on your machine, it will install the Visual Studio 2012 integrated shell with those new projects. There will also be a new menu item “SQL Server Data Tools 2012″ (if you have VS 2012 installed, the menu “Visual Studio 2012″ and ”SQL Server Data Tools 2012″ point to the same exe). You will still continue to see the menu item “SQL Server Data Tools”, which uses the VS 2010 shell.
Note that SSDT-BI is different than SSDT for Visual Studio 2012, which will not install the BI projects.
Note that projects created in Visual Studio 2010 can be opened in Visual Studio 2012 and the other way around without upgrading or downgrading. Yea!
The installation actually runs a SQL Server 2012 setup that allows you to add the feature “SQL Server Data Tools – Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2012″. The feature description is “Installs the SQL Server Business Intelligence projects for Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services”.
Be aware that during the installation, when on the “Installation Type” step, choose “Perform a new installation of SQL Server 2012″ and not “Add features to an existing instance of SQL Server 2012″ or you will get a “same architecture installation” failed message. This is very confusing as it seems strange to me to be running a SQL Server 2012 setup, as well as having to indicate to perform a new installation of SQL Server 2012 even though SQL Server 2012 is already installed. Hopefully this post will help to clear things up!
More info:
SQL Server Data Tools – Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2012 released online
BIDS Templates Come to Visual Studio 2012 in SSDT Update
Installing SSIS for Visual Studio 2012
