Lesson 3: Defining a Data Source View for Your Report Model

After defining the data sources that you will use in your report model project, your next step is to define a data source view for the project. A data source view is a logical data model based on one or more data sources. However, only data source views based on a single data source can be used for report models. Data source views not only encapsulate access to the physical objects, such as tables and views, contained in underlying data sources, but also allow additional annotations, such as definitions for named calculations, named queries, and relationships, to be created and managed outside the underlying data sources. Reporting Services generates the report model from the data source view. In this tutorial, the data source view provides the source information for the model you will generate.

Data source views facilitate the model design process by providing you with a useful representation of the data that you specified. Because metadata is stored in the data source view, you do not need to be connected to the underlying data source to work with the objects. You can rename tables, and fields, as well as add aggregate fields and derived tables, in a data source view without changing the underlying data source. For an efficient model, add only those tables to the data source view that you intend to use.