I did a little bit survey about the Microsoft reporting service tools; Here is the detail.
1. This tools need a SQL server instance to store some application Meta data for itself. But it can use oracle as data source for reporting. It is basically free if we have an sql server license.
2. This tools includes a simple query builder and a report layout designer, we could use report layout designer to visually adjust the report layout and some format stuffs such as the column width, Font. The report layout designer will generate a RDL (report definition language) script based on the outcome of designer GUI, the report query is embedded into RDL script too, and we could modify the RDL script manually.
3. This tools includes a report server that do the query&format based on the RDL script we made by report layout designer, the server will retrieve the data and format the report according the output type we specified, output type could be web page or excel.
4. This tools use RDL script as the interface between the report design GUI and report build&format engine, this way would improve and shorten the process of the design and creation of a brand new report.
But the RDL also bring some drawback, the first thing is that this tools only provide some basic RDL syntax, (RDL is a kind of extensible script, the different development tools vendor could add their own predefined syntax into it). So the reporting build&format engine can only recognize the syntax they have, if we have some complex reports that need some special format effect, this tools cann't accomplish it.
There are a simple workaround for this issue, we could use this tools to do the basic layout and simple formating, and develop another module to do the complex formatting based on the excel file built by this tools.
Introducing the Microsoft reporting service in MSDN TV
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20040506SQLServerLP/manifest.xml
Generating Report Definition Language Programmatically
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/rsprog/htm/rsp_prog_rdl_1go6.asp
