Hi all, I have the option to give my clients Reporting Services via Visual Studio and develop reports or Report Builder 3.0. Please can someone tell me if there is any articles regarding this dicussion. Reporting Services 2008 R2. please help

Hi , Not sure about the Artricle . List of what you can do with one vs. the other would be a lengthy post. First, Report Builder is a client tool. A Reporting Services report server provides multi-user access, scalability, schedule-based subscription delivery, stored data source credentials / shared data sources, role based security, extensibility (custom data extensions, custom delivery extensions, custom report items, custom renderers, custom auth), etc. Report builder is used for ADHOC reporting, where client control the data what they want. Can be bad for Perfromance when you have huge sets of data. With Reporting services you can control the data you wana show. It seems that Report Builder 3.0 is the lighter weight, quicker, easier reporting tool . Reporting Services along with the Report Designer is the more robust product for building enterprise wide reporting solutions. Resources that delineate between the two are a bit sparse right now. And the release of R2 brought us Report Builder 3.0 making many of the available resources even more dated. Let's say you are an analyst and your manager stopped in this morning asking for the latest sales numbers for a particular region by lunchtime. That would most likely be a Report Builder task. If however you are a software developer charged with building the reporting system for an entire department's ongoing reporting needs you'll likely gravitate towards Reporting Services and the Report Designer. You will access and work with Reporting Services via SQL Servers Visual Studio "Shell" also called Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS). Report Builder 3.0 is a browser based product. If you need to know anything specific do post it in. You will get your answer . Regards, PS

PS Although I do agree with your general assessment of the purpose of Report Bulder 3.0, the fact is that the two tools are not as different as you suggest. Report Builder 3.0 (and 2.0) is a client-side executable and does not run in the web browser. Report Builder can be launched from Report Manager or SharePoint as a .NET ClickOnce application or it may be installed as a stand-alone desktop Windows application. You can find the download here. Yes, users can design reports in an ad-hoc manner without saving them to the server but as soon as the report is saved, there are no limitations or differences in the way the report is executed. These reports are deployed to the server in the same way as BIDS or Visual Studio and will perform identically and can consume the same volumes of data. Report Builder and BIDS contain a lot of the same design features and can be used to create reports with advanced features, expressions and custom code. Both will allow you use to custom extensions and assemblies that are typically created by programmers using Visual Studio programming projects. BIDS allows developers to manage multiple RDL files in project and solution groups, and can be integrated with version control applications. Report Builder doesn't have these capabilities. Regarding the title of the original post, for clarity, both BIDS and Report Builder are report designers for Reporting Services reports.Paul Turley, MVP [Hitachi Consulting] SQLServerBIBlog.com *Please vote if helpful*

PS Although I do agree with your general assessment of the purpose of Report Bulder 3.0, the fact is that the two tools are not as different as you suggest. Report Builder 3.0 (and 2.0) is a client-side executable and does not run in the web browser. Report Builder can be launched from Report Manager or SharePoint as a .NET ClickOnce application or it may be installed as a stand-alone desktop Windows application. You can find the download here. Yes, users can design reports in an ad-hoc manner without saving them to the server but as soon as the report is saved, there are no limitations or differences in the way the report is executed. These reports are deployed to the server in the same way as BIDS or Visual Studio and will perform identically and can consume the same volumes of data. Report Builder and BIDS contain a lot of the same design features and can be used to create reports with advanced features, expressions and custom code. Both will allow you use to custom extensions and assemblies that are typically created by programmers using Visual Studio programming projects. BIDS allows developers to manage multiple RDL files in project and solution groups, and can be integrated with version control applications. Report Builder doesn't have these capabilities. Regarding the title of the original post, for clarity, both BIDS and Report Builder are report designers for Reporting Services reports.Paul Turley, MVP [Hitachi Consulting] SQLServerBIBlog.com *Please vote if helpful*