One of the truly potent features of the Enterprise version of Microsoft’s Reporting Services is the ability to run data driven subscriptions. This supports the ability, for example, to create and email a sales report to every store in a retail chain every morning without human intervention. For an organization that’s widely distributed, this kind of thing is a big deal! Unfortunately, this is a feature that is limited to the Enterprise version of SQL Server (which is a lot more expensive than the Standard version).
I worked at a client in the past that needed this data driven subscription capability, but wasn’t prepared to pay for the Enterprise version on their database servers. So we (Andy Warren and myself) built our own data driven subscriptions! Our client kindly agreed to let us share the code:
The link is to a zip file which contains some documentation, some TSQL scripts and a .NET project. The general idea is to set up a database which defines subscriptions and then use .NET to create an instance of SSRS which creates and distributes the report. It worked great! In some ways, it works better than the Enterprise version (better error recovery).
Enjoy!
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