Reporting Services – Curated SQL

Reporting Services and Express Edition

Published 2025-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

One surprise in the release plans for SQL Server 2025 is that SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is being discontinued as a brand. If you have a paid license for SQL Server, you are now able to install Power BI Report Server. Previously, that option required you to have an Enterprise Edition license for SQL Server or a premium level license for Power BI.

But Reporting Services was also previously available for SQL Server Express. That will no longer be supplied, and there’s no option to use Power BI Report Server.

Admittedly, I’ve never really thought about Reporting Services for Express Edition, but I can see the issue. I do wonder if SSRS 2022 will work just fine, and knowing that Microsoft has put so little effort into SSRS lately, you probably aren’t missing much by staying on 2022 SSRS and upgrading the database engine.

Tracking Failed SSRS Subscriptions

Published 2025-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Svetlana Golovko wants a report of failing reports:

We would like to get notifications if any SSRS report subscriptions fail. This feature was working great until it wasn’t. The scheduled SSRS subscription in the SQL Server Agent job didn’t fail and we were not aware of any failures. In some cases, a partial data driven subscription failed.

Moreover, after some testing we realized that the SQL Server Agent job won’t fail for the Standard subscriptions (that are available in SQL Server Standard Edition) either.

Read on to see what happens when a report subscription delivery fails and how you can get details on the failure.

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Reviewing Security Drift in SQL Server Reporting Services

Published 2025-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword checks out who has access to what permissions:

Item level roles are what we’re digging into here. Before we start, it’s worth defining a simple security model so it’s applied consistently. Let’s be real, the instance might not have a long term future but let’s do it right at least, eh?

Read on for a few high-level suggestions, details on what permissions do not carry over from parent objects, and more.

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Farewell, SSRS

Published 2025-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

SQL Server Reporting Services is done-zo:

Starting with SQL Server 2025, Microsoft is consolidating all on-premises reporting services under Power BI Report Server (PBIRS). No new versions of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) will be released. PBIRS becomes the default on-premises reporting solution for SQL Server.

You can expect more information about specific editions when SQL Server 2025 is in General Availability (GA).

This article outlines the implications of these changes for you as a customer, and addresses any questions you might have.

The article claims that Power BI Report Server is a superset of SSRS. That might actually be so, but there’s a nagging part in the back of my brain saying that there are things we can do in SSRS that we can’t in PBIRS and that this won’t be the smooth transition that the article claims. But it’s been long enough since I’ve worked on SSRS in earnest to be able to say with certainty whether it’s the case.

H/T Blake McNeill.

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Sending E-mails in SSRS over Ports other than 25

Published 2025-01-07 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin fixes an error:

After configuring an Email subscription, the subscription result shows: “Failure sending mail: One or more errors occurred.“. In this blog post I will share how I investigated and resolved one such failure.

My first step in troubleshooting this error was to query from the ExecutionLog3 view inside the ReportServer database. I normally do this to check if and why a report subscription has failed its run.

However, in this case all the log records showed success (rsSuccess status):

Read on to see what this indicates, how Eitan was able to troubleshoot the problem, and the ultimate fix.

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The Value of Datasets in SSRS

Published 2024-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Scott Murray writes a query:

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) uses the object type of a data source as the basic unit of connecting a data source to a report. (See this tip – SQL Server Reporting Services SSRS 2017 Data Sources) A data source is the connection details that allow a report designer and report consumer to define where the data lives and includes items like a table in SQL Server or an API. Continuing this concept, the dataset is the basic object that defines the structure of the data to be loaded and establishes a collection of fields.

Read on to dive into the properties of an SSRS dataset.

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Showing SSRS Reports in Modern .NET Apps

Published 2024-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Sebastiao Pereira solves a problem:

Report Viewer was originally developed for the .NET Framework. As the industry shifts towards .NET Core, developers who have traditionally relied on this tool have faced challenges displaying reports within their applications due to compatibility issues. Is it possible to display a report from SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) in a .Net Core Application?

Click through for the answer. As a quick note, we had .NET Core, but then Microsoft renamed it to .NET with .NET 6, so instead we have to differentiate .NET Framework (Windows-only, heavy SDK) with .NET (nee .NET Core, cross-platform, less heavy). I’d rate Sebastiao’s solution a workaround, but one that I doubt Microsoft will ever provide a better solution for, given the heavy de-emphasis on Reporting Services over the past several years.

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Constrained Kerberos Delegation with SSRS and Power BI Gateways

Published 2024-10-07 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards doesn’t want just anyone to double-hop:

Ok, many of you will already be aware that in order to use Integrated Authentication successfully with SSRS particularly, that you have to configure Kerberos Authentication. At a very basic level, this allows the credentials of the user running the report, to be passed to the report server (hop 1) and then along to the target of the SSRS datasource (hop 2), also known as “Double hop” authentication. The delegation part of this signifies where the service (PBIG or SSRS) is allowed to pass these credentials along to.

anywhere, ie…Unconstrained delegation, or

to a restricted set of targets…Constrained delegation.

Read on to see how you can set up constrained delegation.

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Security Practices for SQL Server Reporting Services

Published 2024-09-23 by Kevin Feasel

Scott Murray locks down a service:

What are the various security ramifications when deploying and managing Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)? What are some of the best practices when setting up security within SSRS?

Read on to learn more about to configure SQL Server Reporting Services in three separate tools: the SQL Server Reporting Server Configuration Manager, SSRS itself, and even SQL Server Management Studio.

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Including a SQL Query in an Expression in SSRS

Published 2024-05-14 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin shares a tip:

Why: Most of the time, when you want a flexibility of your SQL query you can use parameterization. However there might be a situation when you’d need to build a dynamic query. In my case I used SQL query within an expression to feed it to multiple data sources targeting different servers with the exact same query.

Read on to see what Slava has fought with in the past.

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Category: Reporting Services