Share via


What's the Killer Feature in SQL server 2008?

After the bad news about what's missing in SQL Server 2008, I thought it would be good to talk about what the most exciting bit is in the new release.  For me this is the next version of Reporting Services. 

Reporting Services in SQL server 2005 can do amazing things and has already shaken up the reporting market place, but for me it has one major drawback and that is that to make it fly you have to be using Visual Studio.  And that's OK for us IT Professionals, but what about lawyers (no jokes please), accountants, sales staff, and all of the non- IT Professionals?  They get report builder which is very easy to use but is also severely limited in what it can do.  This will change in the next release of Reporting Services as you can see from the screen grab below:

Report builder 2008

This is going to make our lives a little easier - we build the report models for the information workers with all the content they need and let them get on with designing their reports their way.  Which will leave us a bit more time to  work on those documentation, and maintenance tasks at the bottom of our in trays.