Click a question to view the answer
(best viewed in Windows Media Player 9 series)

Questions

  1. Jason, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, your role at Microsoft? Who are you?
  2. Reporting services, is that going to ship as part of, what was code named Yukon, which is now SQL Server 2005? Is this a separate product? Tell us a little bit about how you are going to deliver it?
  3. We have to ask the question. What is Reporting Services? It's a great name. What does that concretely mean? Is this just doing ad hoc reports? Is there more to it. What is there?
  4. When you say reporting, right, reporting on what? Are we talking specifically just, I want to suck data out of a relational database and put it into some format, or is there more to it beyond that?
  5. So when you say Web services, lets dwell on that for a second, I have a WSDL endpoint it is serving back some kind of data and you are saying I can consume, I can run reports based on what comes back from the WSDL endpoint?
  6. So when you say I can report, assuming I can report to the various managerial formats, like HTML and PDF and all that stuff. Can I report to other kinds of formats, can I report to XML for example, could I use that then as a source for something else, could I make this a Web service? Is that doable? Can you render it to anything?
  7. Interesting. So outputting into a separate format like XML I presume.
  8. Earlier you had said that Reporting Services integrates with Visual Studio, plugs into Visual Studio and you had used the word development. Do I need to be a developer to use what you guys have got here, or is this something that I can hand off to a boss or an analyst or somebody and say, Go off, produce your own report. Is this something that is non-developer friendly?
  9. Obviously with the next generation SQL Server 2005. There is a lot of interesting developer functionality coming there, in the sense that we're embedding the CLR as part of the database, and that in turn offers us some and unique possibilities, such as user defined types in Yukon. Is that something that you can take advantage of, is that something you have parallels to?
  10. So, for example,if I define a user defined type inside SQL Server2005, create my personal type, or whatever you want to call it, I can then use RS to create reports based around that personal type?
  11. Interesting, okay, very cool. When we're talking about Reporting Services, at a sort of lower level, at a physical topological level, what is this? Is this a store product inside SQL Server 2005 that somebody is calling into? Is this is a standalone executable engine service, Web service, requires ASP.NET, as an architect? How do I factor RS into my topology?
  12. So, then effectively, I would want to run this topologically on top of the same machine, thus running my SQL Server instance?
  13. We've been tossing around in the industry, today, we have been tossing around the term SOA, service-oriented architecture, we are hearing about the Web service revolution and all that good stuff. In some respects Reporting Services seems to sort of fit in with some of that service-oriented nature. You are saying give me a request and I'll hand you back some data, it's a coarse grained concept. Do you guys see yourself integrating more into a service-oriented enterprise as time goes on? Do you guys see Reporting Services taking on more of the service-oriented flavor to it? Obviously, this is a big deal, what is RS' future I guess?
  14. It almost sounds as if, correct me if I am wrong, but it almost sounds as if I could use Reporting Services as a Web service technology. Can I publish WSDL documents out of Reporting Service?
  15. So it is almost like the product is misnamed, it should be Transformation Services?
  16. Interesting, okay, so then the idea of Reporting Services as a Web service is missing the point?
  17. Obviously you guys have plans beyond the current release. Can you give us a little hint, some of the things you guys are working on in terms of future features. What can we expect to see in the SQL Server 2005 timeframe? Do you have releases before then, after then?