Report Builder 2 is Microsoft’s latest tool for power-users to create ad hoc data reports. The tool is different than Report Builder 1 in a significant way. Report Builder 1 was specific to Reporting Services 2005 and requred that a data source be pre-built on the target server. Report Builder 2, although designed for publishing shared reports to Reporting Services 2008, is usable against any ODBC data source that the user has permissions to. It is feasible that reports are built and consumed by the user on their client machine without ever publishing or accessing a data source on a server.

This article shows how to download and install Report Builder 2 on a local machine. For a good article on how to enable the product on a Reporting Services 2008 instance, see the following SQL Server Magazine article (subscription required):

http://www.sqlmag.com/article/reporting-services/report-builder-2-0.aspx

You can download the application from Microsoft at the following location:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9f783224-9871-4eea-b1d5-f3140a253db6&displaylang=en

After downloading the file ReportBuilder.msi to your target system, double click it to begin the install process. You will be walked thought the usual license acceptance and user name dialog. However, when you get to the form looking for the default report server pause. If you have an instance of Reporting Services 2008 in your organization where you can save reports to a “My Reports” folder, enter the URL here. The URL is usually in the format “http//someserver/reportserver”. If you leave this blank, Report Builder will default to saving RDL files to your local documents folder instead.

After the installation is finished, you can find the application in your start menu under “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Report Builder 2.0″. Launch the application and you will be greeted with the main window that looks like the following. In future posts, I will go into how to connect to databases and create simple reports.