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Asked: 2026-05-14T07:10:02+00:00

I work for a ISV. Our product can use both SQL Server and Oracle

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I work for a ISV. Our product can use both SQL Server and Oracle as its back-end server. It includes a number of reports (currently in Crystal).

We are investigating moving to Micrsoft Reporting Services, but I’m beginning to think that it’s a bad idea.

We want for our reports to look and feel as though they are a part of our application, and we will not require SQL Server (the customer can choose Oracle).

Although I see the reporting services supports a stand-alone mode (RDLC), the boundry between what requires SQL server and what doesn’t looks extremely ambiguous. (example, the stand-alone report builder appears to require SQL Server, most of the documentation appears to be part of SQL Server’s documentation)

It looks to me like if I want to keep my application DB-agnostic, I had better steer clear of Reporting Services. Have I missed the boat here?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Thank you for all of the help on this one, guys. I ended up concluding “no” — at least not in our case. After researching the issue, here’s what I found:

    (btw: we want for end users to be able to design reports and then plug them into our product)

    1. There are at least 4 designers for reports (Business Intelligence Analyzer, the built-in Visual Studio designer, Report Builder 2.0, Report Builder 3.0 (in CTP).

    Each of these designers offers a different mix of features, and some of the features do not overlap. (example, you can’t use custom assemblies in ReportBuilder,but you can in Visual Studio).

    Most of the support available on the internet targets RDL (sql server) reports, and not RDLC, very little support for RDLC, and sometimes you find yourself wandering “across the fence” to RDL land, and sometimes the feature support is not the same (custom data extensions, for example).

    Overall, we decided that we were better off sticking with Crystal. It’s just my opinion, but it looks to me like this: Strictly speaking, Reporting Services can run stand-alone, but it’s really not marketed/built/designed with that in mind. It seems as though You are really expected to be using it in conjunction with SQL Server — especially if you want to have advanced users (and not programmers) designing reports.

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