Tuesday, August 01, 2017

SSRS. Dataset or View? Pros and cons.

In the last few months I've been using the tool SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), which was Microsoft's answer to Crystal Report. It uses Visual Studio and SQL Server as a way to publish report files as web pages.

A dataset is the "heart" of an SSRS report. It is simply a query that you run from the report. In many ways it's similar to running a view in SQL, in the sense that the query may join multiple tables, use parameters, use common table expressions (CTE's) and almost every function that a query can do.