SQL 2005 report models will ship with a curious and admittedly incomplete solution for handling "the information users typically want to see about an instance of entity X". The problem is that there are many scenarios for which the answer to that question...

The top part of the Explorer pane in Report Builder is probably unlike anything most people have ever used. It starts out as a flat list of entities -- big "things" in your database like Customers, Orders, Products, etc. -- but then rearranges itself once you've added the first field to your report into an auto-collapsing, recursive tree. What's really going on here? Why the new-fangled interface?...

Here's a neat trick a co-worker and I discovered this afternoon for creating an inline bar chart (an inline data visualization in a table or other data region). 1. Add an embedded image to your report that will serve as the "bar" (a simple horizontal...