SSRS 2019 Modern Paginated Reports with Drilldowns Note from the Data Whisperer

By Tom Nonmacher

Welcome back to SQLSupport.org! Today, we're going to delve into the exciting world of modern paginated reports using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) 2019. Paginated reports are a cornerstone of business reporting - they're designed to be generated and read on a page-by-page basis, just like a book. As the Data Whisperer, I'm going to guide you on how to implement drilldowns in your reports, making them much more interactive and user-friendly.

Before we jump into SSRS 2019, let's take a quick trip back in time to SQL Server 2012 and 2014. Back then, creating paginated reports involved a decent amount of manual work. However, the introduction of SSRS 2019 has made creating these reports more efficient and straightforward, especially with the addition of drilldown capabilities.

A drilldown report is a report which allows you to hide detail data until you want to see it. Drilldowns can improve performance by pulling in data only as needed and make reports easier to understand by breaking them up into more digestible chunks. Let's start with a simple example using T-SQL:

-- Create a sample table
CREATE TABLE Sales (Region nvarchar(50), TotalSales money);
-- Insert some data into the table
INSERT INTO Sales VALUES ('North', 1000), ('South', 2000), ('East', 1500), ('West', 1800);
-- Select data from the table
SELECT * FROM Sales;

In the code above, we've created a simple table called Sales, with columns for Region and TotalSales. We've inserted some data and then selected it. This table could form the basis of a simple paginated report. Now let's see how we could use this data in a drilldown report.

Using SSRS 2019, we can create a report with a table that shows total sales by region. The regions can be set up as a drilldown, so that clicking on a region name will show detailed sales data for that region. This kind of report can be very helpful for users who want to get a quick overview of sales data but also have the option to delve deeper when needed.

But what about different databases? How would a drilldown report work if we were using MySQL 5.6 or IBM DB2 10.5? Let's take a look at an example using MySQL:

-- Create a sample table in MySQL
CREATE TABLE Sales (Region varchar(50), TotalSales decimal(10,2));
-- Insert some data into the table
INSERT INTO Sales VALUES ('North', 1000), ('South', 2000), ('East', 1500), ('West', 1800);
-- Select data from the table
SELECT * FROM Sales;

As you can see, the syntax is slightly different for MySQL, but the concept is the same. Once we have our data, we can use SSRS 2019 to create a drilldown report just like we did with the SQL Server data.

In conclusion, SSRS 2019 brings a lot of powerful features for creating modern paginated reports. Whether you're using SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, or Azure SQL, you can create interactive, user-friendly drilldown reports that make it easy for users to understand and analyze their data. Stay tuned for more tips and tricks from your Data Whisperer here at SQLSupport.org!

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