SQL Server Reporting Services, a DBA’s tool?
Traditionally, SQL Server Reporting Services has been thought of as strictly a Business Intelligence tool that helps organizations make business decisions based on the data they have stored. Over the past several years I have been preaching that there is a great deal of utility that Reporting Services can provide above and beyond what is strictly thought of as Business Intelligence.
As a DBA, one of the most tedious and repetitive tasks that you must do on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis is to deliver reports to colleague’s and/or managers. A manager might as for something simple such as, “Show me how much disk space is available on each drive on server X?” or “Show me the status of all of our scheduled jobs on server Y?” What might appear a trivial tasks involves several steps, many I’m sure you’ve gone through already today:
- Build a query that returns the necessary data.
- Run the query in Management Studio and validate the result set.
- Copy and paste the result set into Microsoft Word or Excel
- Organize and format the data so that it looks presentable
- Compose an e-mail to the requestor with the file you created as the attachment.
What this presentation goes into is an approach for automating these tasks using Reporting Services. If you build these reports into SSRS they can first of all be created with a single mouse click, and even better they can be automatically delivered on any given schedule.
If you’re still interested in learning more about this topic, I have posted the presentation materials (including the slide deck, sample RDL files, and sample SQL Scripts) to Quest’s SQL Server Community Site (http://sqlserver.quest.com/thread.jspa?threadID=6781) where anyone can download them and ask any follow up questions.
Happy Reporting!!!
Tags: Reporting Services
