Question

We have a project that needs reporting capabilities, but the backing database is Oracle (this is hard requirement), and if it is possible I’d like to avoid having to purchase SQL Server for the deployment environment.

Our experience thus far has been to develop deploy reports in SSRS, but now it seems we will have to use local reports. I’d like to know whether there are any functional drawbacks in local reports vs remote reports (SSRS).

Some of the requirements we have are:

• Ability to export in excel and pdf
• Drill-through capabilities
• Charts

My current research says that there aren’t any functional drawbacks to using local reports, but the article talks is about sql server 2005, and we are using VS 2008. Is this true? Are there going to be any other functional problems ahead?

Answer 1

Even no one answered this question, I wanted to leave the feedback for possible future inquiries.

We implemented the project using RDLC reports and mostly things worked fine. Graphs, drill throughs, matrices etc.

Two major differences are to be noted:

1. No filter parameters are generated for you. Reporting services places a strip of customizable filters on top of the report. For RDLC reports you have to build these filters manually.
2. Data sources are a little harder to work with. Most problems we had was because or backend database was oracle and the entity wrapper had some issues with figuring out the return schemas of procedures. So, we used views instead.