Ask HN: What Is a Good Microsoft Reporting Service Alternate

6 points·nirajs··2 comments

We've been using MS reporting services for ever. We want to move to something else. What framework, services you use for reporting. I searched SO but I couldn't find a good alternative.

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There are other things, like Crystal Reports, Active Reports etc. But what are your requirements? e.g. do you have report writers that need to create reports, or are they developer created only? does it need to handle report subscription like SSRS? Do you need analytics access (e.g. mdx capable reporting)?

I spent quite a long time working with/in SSRS, but we had better success when we used Active Reports. I dreaded working in SSRS overall because it has so many quirks that you have to deal with and it took a lot of tuning, but it does do its job most of the time. Performance wise, Active reports was superior for what we were doing, I found that with the same stored procedure backing the report Active Reports would product output 2-3x faster than SSRS most of the time using far less resources. Not that it is perfect either.

I had this exact same problem a while back so I made this extremely simple reporting tool [1]. Basically you just give it one or more SQL queries and it displays them as tables on a new webpage. (You can also add charts and things through javascript.)

It may be too simple for what you need, but it works great for me.

[1] https://github.com/gregpinero/django-mr_reports

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