ChristianSteven BI Blog

 Accessing information about how your company is faring through multiple perspectives can be daunting. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) allows your company to view data that improves your Business Intelligence.  Unfortunately, most of the licenses are expensive and narrow in scope. Even worse, they give you an ‘SSRS data driven subscription not available’ notice. Our SSRS Data Driven Subscription software, SQL-RD, allows you to use this feature even on a SQL Server Standard Edition license.

SQL Server’s SSRS is a powerful report generation and deployment engine. With all its power, SQL Server Reporting Services has a built-in scheduling and automation tool where administrators can schedule SSRS reports subscriptions. If that is the case, then why on earth would an admin want to rely on an external or dedicated report scheduler? 

Imagine that the management team needs to receive 10 weekly status reports that include finances, inventory, sales etc. As usual, you have 10 subscriptions setup that deliver these reports. Everything is working just fine, then suddenly management decides that they no longer want to fuss with 10 different reports and 10 different emails. Instead, they want one document that encompasses all the weekly information they need. Great, now you have to write a whole new report, deploy it, and then set up the subscriptions all over again. Or do you? Using SQL-RD's Package Schedule, you can merge SSRS report output into a single PDF, text, or Excel file without the need to change the reports.

The SSRS report has been written, parameters have been set, and now it’s time to go live with the report. There are still a few lingering questions before users can start happily reading the report. How will they subscribe to the report? What format will the report be? What kind of security needs to exist around the report? These questions can determine what kind of tool to use to schedule your SSRS report.

There’s nothing more frustrating than an automated email report that refuses to email itself. On a bad day, it may feel like your business intelligence solution is working against you, and nothing drives that feeling home like an SSRS data driven subscription email hiccup. We’ve examined some of the common problems and came up with a few simple solutions.