Some Similarities and Dissimilarities between 3 different Report Creation Tools from Microsoft

The three main Report Creation tools from Microsoft are Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS), Report Builder 1.0 and Report Builder 2.0

- The main similarity in all the three of them is that all these tools create RDL (Report Definition Language)

- BIDS provides integrated environment for working with reporting services, integration services and analysis services, which is available with Visual Studio interface. Report Builder tools facilitate working for users who are not familiar with Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS).

- BIDS provides more flexibility in terms of deployment configurations as well as provides different rendering extensions.

- The query designer is available for BIDS and Report Builder 2.0 but is not available with Report Builder 1.0.

- We can only create reports on report models with Report Builder 1.0. With BIDS as well as Report Builder 2.0, the report can be based on data source other than report model like relational data sources.

- Multidimensional data source are directly available with query designer for BIDS. For Report Builder, we can create report models on multidimensional data and then subsequently reports can be created based on them.

- Use of query files (.sql) is available with BIDS and Report Builder 2.0

- Report designing wizard is available only with BIDS. We also have a wizard for Report Builder 2.0 for report creation.

- All the three tools provide rendering extensions for Word, Excel, PDF, CSV (Comma limited).

- Viewing of .RDL source is only supported with BIDS.