Limitations of Report Builder

What functionality does Report builder NOT provide that can be achieved within Report Designer through BIDS. Basically what are the limitations of report builder, what can report builder not do?

Thanks

Can anyone help please?

I believe it is the case that you cannot open a report developed in report designer through report builder. Is this true?

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Report Builder is not a slimmed down version of Report Designer, it is a completely different design time experience. As such I don't think it is quite valid to try to compare them from a feature perspective because they do completely different things.

ReportBuilder is designed for people who don't know anything about the physical structure of the underlying data, and want to build "simple" reports based on predefined semantic models of the data. It is geared for users who want to think in terms of their business entities, and not tables/columns.

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Ok, but is it correct you cannot edit reports with report builder?

1. Whether they were built using Report Builder

2. Or where built with report designer

Thanks

|||You should be able to edit reports you have previously created using Report Builder.|||

The principal difference between Report Builder and Report Designer is the approach one would take to create report and skills level required for it.

Report Designer is a universal tool where one can create any kind of report of any kind of complexity. This requires the author to provide SQL statement that would return data, understand that data and how to group it and how to build aggregates such as Sum/Count/Average etc, design layout, attach fields from query to the layout, write VB expressions, may be custom code (again VB) or custom assemblies that would extend default function library and so on. Once such report is created, it is published and end users execute it to see results.

Report Builder is a new technology that addresses the necessity of quick ad-hoc reports that can be created easily by users without skills in any programming environments, languages and have no idea how physical database is organised. That does not mean that Report Builder is less capable, one can create very sophisticated reports with it. It's just the purpose and the scope are a bit different. Report Builder requires semantic models which currently can be built for MS Sql Server only. In Yukon SP2 model support is extended to include Oracle databases. Note that adhoc reports created in Report Builder can be saved (published) to report server. They also can be loaded into Report Designer, but once changed in RD, they can no longer be loaded back into RB.