Never say never!

About five years ago, I had the unfortunate task of modifying existing reports for an e-commerce application. I use the word unfortunate because I did not enjoy the work. My employer at the time was using a reporting application that required writing Visual Basic 6.0 code to create reports. The idea of programming reports in Visual Basic was strange to me. I felt I could have simply created web pages to generate the reports with less effort. After several weeks of working with this application, I vowed that I would never work with a reporting application again.

For a few years, I managed to successfully avoid any sort of report writing. Then, about two years ago as I was preparing for one of my exams for my MSDBA certification, an executive at Crowe Chizek, my current employer, came up to me and said something along the lines of, “Since you are working on your SQL exam, why don’t you also spend some time looking into product called Reporting Services?” I admit that I was hesitant to spend any time with this product. But what I found over time was not what I expected: I really enjoyed working with Reporting Services—so much, in fact, that over the next year I made presentations to numerous user groups in three states touting my newfound knowledge of Reporting Services. This excitement brought me to TechEd 2005 in Florida, where I met Bill Baker (Microsoft) and his SQL Server Business Intelligence team. I was motivated by what I learned about SQL Server 2005 and the Business Intelligence tools, such as Reporting Services, Integration Services, and Analysis Services.

After returning from TechEd, I helped start a successful SQL Server user group that meets monthly in Indianapolis. I spent the last 12 months at Crowe Chizek working on applications built around Reporting Services. And now, I have coauthored on this second edition of a book on Reporting Services, a reporting application!

Never say never!

Bret Updegraff