PHP/MSSQL Report Writing

Question

What is a good method of writing reports using PHP and MSSQL? Is there a third party vendor that supports MSSQL?

Answer 1

SQL Server comes with Reporting Services out of the box as of version 2005. If you are using SQL Server 2000, Reporting Services 2000 is available as a free download. Reporting Services is web based, so you can drive it off a URL referred from anywhere. You can also embed hyperlinks back out to your application in the reports.

Most if not all third party reporting tools support SQL Server. Anything with an ODBC facility can be made to query off it. If you need to run the web server supporting the reports on something other than windows, you could look at one of the open-source systems such as Pentaho, BIRT or Jasper Reports.