Specifications
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C H A P T E R 9
Reporting Services
Enhancements
I
f you thought Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services introduced a lot of great
new features to the reporting platform, just wait until you discover what’s new in
Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008 R2. The Reporting Services development team
at Microsoft has been working hard to incorporate a variety of improvements into the
product that should make your life as a report developer or administrator much simpler.
New Data Sources
This release supports a few new data sources to expand your options for report develop-
ment. When you use the Data Source Properties dialog box to create a new data source,
you see Microsoft SharePoint List, Microsoft SQL Azure, and Microsoft SQL Server Parallel
Data Warehouse (covered in Chapter 6, “Scalable Data Warehousing”) as new options in
the Type drop-down list. To build a dataset with any of these sources, you can use a graph-
ical query designer or type a query string applicable to the data source provider type.
You can also use SQL Server PowerPivot for SharePoint as a data source, although this
option is not included in the list of data source providers. Instead, you use the SQL Server
Analysis Services provider and then provide the URL for the workbook that you want to
use as a data source. You can learn more about using a PowerPivot workbook as a data
source in Chapter 10, “Self-Service Analysis with PowerPivot.”
Expression Language Improvements
There are several new functions added to the expression language, as well as new capa-
bilities for existing functions. These improvements allow you to combine data from two
different datasets in the same data region, create aggregated values from aggregated
values, dene report layout behavior that depends on the rendering format, and modify
report variables during report execution.