Introduction

Traditional Business Intelligence implementation, also known as Corporate Business Intelligence, is widely used, and analytical reports built against it satisfy most reporting requirements. The rise of modern concepts and technologies has moved traditional BI to self-service BI, but the requirements for reporting still exist.

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) offers many features and functionalities to create a BI reporting solution. Modern Business Intelligence solutions maintain data with various structures, such as Relational Data Warehouses with schema like Star and Snowflake, OLAP Structures, and In-Memory data tables combined with ColumnStore indexing and Hadoop. Business users want a single reporting platform for connecting with all these data sources and getting data into reports as per need. Reporting Services allows us to author reports against all these data sources either directly, or by using middle-tier components.

Transact SQL (T-SQL) is used for authoring...