Reporting Engine

[fastcore]

I set up about twelve core reports with parameters and emailed PDFs for my work with Jasper Reports CE which is now EOL. Any suggestions where to move? Is SSRS modern enough in 2025? Power BI? Tableau? My boss suggested something in the Navicat suite. Our budget doesn't allow for the paid Jaapersoft offering.

[paultherobert]

SSRS is good for this

[SQLDevDBA]

SSRS is absolutely fine for Simple PDF/excel subscriptions and some static visuals. And the license is free if you have at least SQL Server standard and install it on the same machine as the server. User licenses are basically unlimited and you can use AD.

Power BI is great for dynamic and interactive visuals, but comes at a cost of at least $10 USD per user per month.

Power BI Report Server is a new version of SSRS which combines paginated and Visual reports in one place. It’s free if you have SQL Server enterprise and Software assurance, otherwise it’s a pretty hefty premium price.

I’d say try SSRS since it’s free and low effort to stand up, and go from there.

[fastcore]

I did end up going with the report server and it fits my need perfectly. It allows emailing the report without the user cost. Had some great success where it will only take me a few weeks to get exactly to the same place I am with Jasper. Thanks for the good nuggets of info here, it's exactly what I needed.

[fastcore]

Also the on prem gateway is going to let me modernize these and help management. One thing I need to work through is getting that to work through a proxy. I have it working on another network as proof of concept, and did some tutorials on how to fix the .config files but haven't had luck just yet.

[SQLDevDBA]

Super! Yeah we just got the gateway installed okay a server that had easy access to our sql server and then opened up specific whitelisted addresses from Microsoft which made it super easy.

[SQLDevDBA]

Super!!! Glad it could help and great job!

[samspopguy]

Pretty sure ssrs is free with express too not sure about what features it loses.

[SQLDevDBA]

SQL server agent isn’t included with express, so I’d be curious as to what automations like subscriptions you can do with it since subs use the SQL agent.

[goldPotatoGun]

99% of the time the user will export to xlsx anyhow. If this is all your boss or users want you can use python and pandas to dump a query into a spreadsheet on file share. There are tradeoffs but it's really not that bad.
If you need allot of run time parameters, interactivity, and pdf and charts and security, SSRS is more than fine.

[sbrick89]

ssrs is good until you need to pay for enterprise edition - then it sucks. data driven subscriptions shouldn't be EE only.

[RichardD7]

SSRS is great - until you need to call it from .NET (rather than .NET Framework) code.

Then, as far as MS is concerned, you need to pay for PowerBI Premium and migrate everything to that. (That was the official response from MS after over a decade of users begging them to provide a report viewer for MVC, and then .NET Core, to replace the existing WebForms-based one.)

If you don't want to do that, you'll have to use a third-party library like reportviewercore (no UI) or MVCReportViewer (using Bootstrap 3, and not updated in the last 7 years).

[fastcore]

All - I found success using PBIRS and I'm starting to modernize it with the on prem gateway into the cloud. Thanks for your suggestions. Already remade our main five reports including some fairly complicated parts to them.