Reporting Tools Added to SQL Server

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp. last week shipped software that adds reporting capabilities to SQL Server 2000, rounding out the line of business intelligence tools the company integrates with its relational database.

SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services has been available for beta testing since October. One of the testers was The Long & Foster Cos., a Fairfax, Va.-based real estate services firm that wants to standardize on the technology to deliver nearly 300 corporate reports to its 13,000 employees.

Lance Morimoto, senior manager of e-commerce and application development at Long & Foster, said it now uses a mishmash of reporting tools from vendors like Cognos Inc. and Crystal Decisions Inc., which was acquired by Business Objects SA in December. Long & Foster has completed a pilot program involving 35 reports and is happy with the Reporting Services software so far, he said.

The company created the 35 reports with Microsoft's new Report Writer authoring tool, which is offered as an add-on to the vendor's Visual Studio .Net development suite. "The whole solution is pretty tightly integrated with .Net," Morimoto noted.

But he added that it's too early to tell whether Report Writer will suffice for porting Long & Foster's 250 existing reports to Microsoft's technology. There may still be a need to use third-party software like Crystal Reports, he said.

Dan Zerfas, vice president of application development at First Premier Bank in Sioux Falls, S.D., said the version of Report Writer that was included with the second beta release of Reporting Services in November was much better than the initial test code. "It's like night and day," he said.

First Premier had been building reports using Microsoft's SQL Query Analyzer and Access database. Its developers were able to virtually cut and paste the Access code into Reporting Services, which saved a lot of time, Zerfas said. They also liked the software's user interface, he added.

Philip Russom, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said he doesn't expect Microsoft's entry into the market to hurt reporting tools vendors too badly. Report Writer is a "Version 1" product that needs to mature, Russom said, adding that the success of Reporting Services depends partly on whether vendors such as Cognos and Business Objects agree to support Microsoft's Report Definition Language. That would let reports authored with third-party tools be managed and distributed through Microsoft's software.

Microsoft released Reporting Services 11 months after announcing its plan to add the technology . It originally planned to introduce the software with Yukon, a 64-bit upgrade of SQL Server. But the Yukon launch was delayed until later this year, prompting Microsoft to offer the reporting capabilities with SQL Server 2000.