Question

I have some records in SharePoint server. I have to create some reports using SSRS. I am little bit confuse that I used SharePoint list for creating reports or I used separate database for creating SSRS report. Please let me know which one is best way for creating SSRS report, using SharePoint list or using separate SQL Server database.

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you’re dealing with relatively small datasets, it’s probably fine to get data from SharePoint lists but this is not supported directly until SSRS 2008 R2. However, you can try to adapt the technique described here for earlier versions:

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/24469/SQL-Reporting-Services-data-from-SharePoint-lists

This example explains how to do this with SharePoint 2007 – I’m not sure what you’d need to do to make it work with SharePoint 2010. You don’t indicate in your question which version of SharePoint you’re using, so I’ll throw it out there just in case it’s helpful.

If you’re using SSRS 2008 R2, then you have a built-in SharePoint list source which you can learn about here: http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2068/using-a-sharepoint-list-as-a-data-source-in-sql-server-reporting-services-2008-r2/

I would consider it a reasonable source if the reports run fast enough. If they don’t, you might need to set up a separate database so that you can tune the queries and/or the data to get better performance.