Thursday, June 23, 2011

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services vs PerformancePoint Services

These 2 products aren't often compared with each other, and they are in fact different. However there are times where their capabilities overlap and reasons for using one instead of the other may be unclear, especially when using these tools together with Analysis Services.

Since not much information on such aspects seem to be available on the internet, below is a basic list displaying some comparisons.


Product
Standardized reports
Dynamic dashboards
Audience
Few to many users
Power users
Usage
Operational and Management
Strategy and Management
Measures
Fixed
Changeable
Dimensions
Fixed
Changeable
Drilldown
Fixed drilldown or drill through path as defined in report
Flexible drilldown for any report
Styling
Customizable to the lowest detail
Fixed appearance
Distribution
Online, Email, File Share or Printed
Online
Export
CSV, Excel, Image, PDF, Word or XML
Excel, PowerPoint (Individual Dashboard Elements)
Security
At report level. Users see what the report displays
At data warehouse level. Users see all data they have access to

It is certainly possible to implement some tricks or workarounds in order to achieve some capabilities such as styling in PerformancePoint using CSS, but those were the general aspects of the two tools. It should give a good idea of the differences.

3 comments:

  1. I was looking for a clear comparison between SSRS and PerformancePoint Services in MSSP 2K10 to see how they overlap.This is the first blog post I come across, illustrating the products' usages so clearly. Thank you Andrew for the great post. I look forward to reading your interesting future posts.

    All the very best.

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  2. This is fantastic and just what I was looking for. I am currently looking into reporting options for SharePoint and it seems there are quite a few but unfortunately little it does OTB - standard version at least.

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  3. Thanks for the feedback. It might be helpful to know that you can use SharePoint lists as data sources for Reporting Services reports. So it is possible to combine data from Cubes in Analysis Services as well as any existing or custom lists from your SharePoint site.

    I was meaning to write some posts about that for a while, as there is not as much as desired available online.

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