Can a SSRS report serve as a datasource for another SSRS report?

Can SSRS reports serve as datasources for other reports?

I'm working to retire an old Access application that was created ages ago.  Now that we have SSRS, I'm replicating as closely as possible in my new reports the look and feel users are familiar with.

Most of the reports I'm developing come from our SQL server.  We also have some SSRS reports that draw from an Oracle back end.  For contractural reasons we can't directly query the Oracle server, but if we could use the SSRS reports that do draw from Oracle as a datasource, I might be able to achieve the same end result.

Is it possible to combine reports (or at least data from the reports) from both sources (SQL and Oracle) onto a single "dashboard-type" report?

Or is an rdl limited to one datasource and what I'm proposing akin to mixing apples and oranges? 

Would "Report Models" help?  (I haven't worked with them yet but a couple articles I've googled make me wonder if that would be a workaround.)

Thanks in advance for any help.

Christian Bahnsen

What version of SSRS are you using? as it could affect te options available. You can definitely consume other reports but not exactly as you are referring to. You can use a sub report that points the the other report containing oracle data. Also note that you can have a mixture of data sources in one report. In 2008 r2 you could deploy report parts and consume it in other reports as well as SharePoint. You shouldn't have any problems just using a sub report. Good luck, Brian K. McDonald

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I think Brian said it all.

Let me just aware you when you say this: 

Christian said:

Is it possible to combine reports (or at least data from the reports) from both sources (SQL and Oracle) onto a single "dashboard-type" report?

Or is an rdl limited to one datasource and what I'm proposing akin to mixing apples and oranges? 

You can create multiple datasets. Lets call dataset as a query. Each query connects into a source/database. This being said, you can have 2 datasets, one querying SQL and the other one querying Oracle. You can only query both databases in a single dataset if you have some linked server, synonym or other similar approach.

Brian, thank you for your reply and the great work you do for our community.

We're using 2008 Standard Edition.

I'll look into the sub-report approach.

I've used multiple datasets before but I thought a report was limited to one datasource.  I'll test that.

We don't have R2 so the report parts probably aren't an option.  (Thanks for jogging my memory.  I knew I'd read somewhere about report parts but couldn't remember the exact term.)

We do have SharePoint 2007 and I'll look into using Report Viewer Web Parts.

Thanks again for your suggestions.  I'll report back when I figure out the best solution.

Chris

Marco, thank you for your reply and all the great work you do for our community.

As I mentioned in the reply to Brian, I've used multiple datasets before but they all used the same datasource.

When I've needed to query more than one database I've created a stored procedure in one of them, used that database as the datasource, the sproc as the dataset, and everything works fine.

This is the first time I'm trying to pull together data from more than one server so I'm still figuring out how to do that.

I'll talk with our DBA about linked servers and synonyms.

Thanks again.

Chris

Thank you! Sub reports or multiple data sources should work fine. :) Please mark this as answered when you have an opportunity to help others searching for similar details.