SQL Server Reporting Services is Dead. Is SSIS Next?
It’s official: SQL Server 2022 was the last release for SSRS.
At SQLBits this week, Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2025 won’t include SSRS.
Instead, all SQL Server 2025 customers will get free licensing for the on-premises Power BI Report Server (PBIRS.) The same license key you use to install 2025 will also work to activate PBIRS.
Microsoft’s got links on how it’ll work:
- FAQ on the change – like why they’re doing it and how licensing will work
- How to migrate from SSRS to PBIRS
- How to migrate your RDL reports to PBIRS
Like any transition, there’s going to be manual work involved. Some data sources aren’t supported, and some SSRS features (like linked reports) aren’t supported. It reminds me of the DTS-package-to-SSIS conversion years ago, which even spawned small consulting companies that focused exclusively on that kind of work because there was so much of it. This transition will keep Microsoft partners busy for a few years.
I don’t do any reporting work, but I think the change makes complete sense for Microsoft and for folks who want better reporting. The change log for Power BI Desktop and for Power BI Report Server make it clear that Microsoft’s been investing way more in those products, whereas SSRS hasn’t gotten any love in years. I have fond memories of SSRS from 20 years ago, back when it came out and quickly decimated the market share of Crystal Reports. However, the writing’s been on the wall for quite a while. Power BI’s where the action is.
So, does this mean the gradual end of the free-in-the-box BI bundle that emerged in 2005: SQL Server Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Service? Those tools have all steadily declined in usage. Well, SSAS gets improvements in SQL Server 2025, but SSIS’s 2025 changes seem to be more about removing stuff than adding it. Might SSIS be next on the chopping block?
My guess is that SSRS’s ending was easier because Microsoft already had a fully on-premises solution in PBIRS. However, fully on-premises folks don’t have a Microsoft solution to replace SSIS yet. The closest thing they have is a self-hosted integration runtime, but the control is still dependent on the cloud. Announcing the ending of SSIS would be harder if Microsoft doesn’t have an alternative, so rather than ending it outright, they’re just stripping away stuff they don’t want to support (like Attunity and Hadoop.) Given that SSIS gets much less attention from end users (as opposed to reporting apps), Microsoft will probably let SSIS soldier on with zero development effort, like Service Broker. If it works for you, great – keep using it! But just know that the writing’s on the wall for this one, too.
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Problem with SSIS is that it doesn’t really support modern data sources and destinations, the core functionality has not been updated on years. And is getting clunky to use. The focus will be on fabric data pipelines, which tbh is more stable , modern and easier to use. SSIS is still king on my mind but has been left to rot
COZYROC provides more than 160 application connectors for SSIS and I believe that is more than ADF provides. The library cost is also very affordable.
A majority of CozyRoc components are specific Rest API connectors (Salesforce, SurveyMonkey, ServiceNow, HubSpot,etc). You can plug an infinite number of Rest APIs into ADF using the same connection string (Authorization URL, Client ID & Client Secret if using OAuth2, etc) ADF is the love child of Microsoft and as more ETL Developers get familiar with it, it will likely be the dominant dependency for data pipelines, integrations, etc. Will SSIS in general go away overnight, no because so many enterprise users still rely on it and finding an alternative solution would be a high cost project.
ADF doesn’t support applications. Each application configuration requires work and dedication to make it usable. Just having the connectivity portion is not enough. You can very easily define the authentication in COZYROC’s components as well if that is the goal. We have pre-built templates for all major authentication mechanisms.
Fabric and stability are not two terms I would use in the same sentence.
A little saddened by this, but not surprised. SSRS hasn’t gotten a whole lot of love lately with PBI getting everything. (Though even PBI “Paginated” reports are just RDL, so … not sure what to make of that.) Sometimes you just need a simple report that doesn’t try to do data viz or analysis and SSRS fit that bill pretty well.
I can easily see SSIS hitting that chopping block at some point, if only because maintaining the tooling around it will get more costly for MS. Right now there’s not a great MS alternative. Azure Data Factory – cloud, expensive, not quite as extensible, and not a great choice if you’re all on-prem. PowerShell – helpful, but doesn’t “stream” data as well as SSIS can. It’s still a good option when you have to move data that’s not going to change shape very often. It doesn’t get the push that other ETL solutions get, but it pretty much “just works”. I’m sometimes disappointed that DBAs don’t know the basic amount of SSIS to help out with some of what it does really well and without a lot of fuss.
I couldn’t praise SSIS even with a gun to my head. I have never encountered an SSIS package that I couldn’t rewrite in Python or PowerShell in less time than it would take to add a minor new feature to the SSIS package.
I guess you like to write a lot of mindless code. Most of the integration work in SSIS can be implemented without any coding. And that is a major benefit compared to coded solutions that require a programmer to create and maintain.
That’s what I thought at first, but many alternative are high maintenance if you already have a sql server. As always, it is a tradeoff. For us, it is stable and does the job day in day out. Like powershell, I would love to hate it, but can’t. (can’t currently say the same for fabric). I could imagine SSIS get blamed because of monstrosity people have build with it.
Until you need the power of SSIS running multiple threads on the same or multiple files
Hard to do in Powershell even using runspaces (where to split the single file etc)
SSIS still smokes it
To me, ADF is the SSIS replacement, especially as companies move to the cloud. Power BI Report Server doesn’t have a lot of the functionality that SSRS currently has when it comes to automated emails, extract types etc. We have had talks with Microsoft reps and they said that there are no plans to do away with SSRS at this time(at least that’s what we were told earlier this year). If they do away with SSRS, PBRS isn’t the replacement, it would be PBRS plus a combination of other services like power automate, which could be their end game anyways as they push everyone to fabric
ADF is cloud-only and therefore a dead end in my opinion. You can use SSIS both on-premises and in the cloud. Truly a hybrid-capable platform.
PBIRS is MUCH closer to being an SSRS replacement than ADF is to being an SSIS replacement. Even without that much in the way of feature updates in the last 8+ years, SSIS is dramatically more feature-rich than ADF is
While I understand that it was probably easier to remove SSRS since, as you mentioned, there’s already a working on-prem solution ready to go, SSIS has needed the axe years ago. I have up on it about 5 years ago, and just started writing custom Powershell and utilizing bulk import with format files for all of my ETL needs. Actual Debugging! SSIS….one of those S’s stands for sucks….
SSIS is the best ETL platform on the market even in 2025. It is also the best pipeline platform from Microsoft, too. I don’t think it will disappear any time soon.
If SSIS is the best then there must be a lot of garbage ETL platforms.
I worked with SSIS for many years (luckily many years ago now) and recall the struggle to do anything mildly complex. And we did a lot with it and pushed it to its limits. Also I recall a lot of the workarounds for all the shortcomings it had. I hated it but it was free and that was what kept management pushing its use. Why would an SSIS package change just by looking through it in the IDE? But it does…and makes comparison a real pain. Just because I left off looking at some part of the workflow and saved something the package appears different in tons of areas…but that is SSIS? Try creating parent and child packages in any easy way. Never is. That is why they had to create the tools for it like BIDS Helper and others to assist you in being able to deal with SSIS and all it lacked or the hassles it created because of how poorly designed it is/was.
But with that said we did use it a lot. But I am glad I haven’t had to touch it for a long time now.
However, maybe I always used it the wrong way and never figured out the (one) right way to approach it. I kind of doubt it though.
Big fan of SSIS we have literally 1000s of interfaces running, it’s the script task functionality which really takes it to another level and how easily it connects to sql server and with a little coaxing with Oracle. Have been waiting for years for an update. SSRS dying already caused us issues with the web component to display SSRS reports not being supported.
This makes me sad, as I do a ton of reporting in SSRS. Most my clients never graduated away from green-bar style reporting. For the young’en’s out there: green-bar was the paper that old line printers with tractor feeds printed on. Power-BI had plenty of tools they didn’t want, and when I looked under the hood and found paginated reports were still just SSRS, I just kept using SSRS. So now I finally need to embrace Power-BI.
Now I wait for the “brilliant” designers to replace T-SQL with XSLT (shudder)…
PBIRS is basically an SSRS Report Server that can host Power BI as well as SSRS reports.
Within PowerBI, SSRS reports are referred to as “Paginated Reports”.
So, on the whole I think that because PBIRS is PBI and SSRS packaged together anyway, they are removing SSRS as a separate entity. I think this is not as bad as it first appears.
Stopping supporting attunity means that oracle integrations are a thing of the past or that the Big Red O has finally written decent drivers. We stopped using Attunity around the time ODP.net got to be useful.
COZYROC has provided Oracle bulk-load component for more than 15 years.
I can’t see SSIS going the same way because there isn’t an on-prem replacement for it (unless you want to roll your own integrations in code, and our org definitely doesn’t have the resources/cash to do this)
Why is there so much animosity between the traditional data guys and the cloud guys? What SSIS/SSAs/SSRs did for the market was make it affordable for small to medium companies to do BI and Analytics! If it was not for this more than half of you would not have jobs today! All the cloud is is distributed computing…….governed by 3 big players worldwide…… Talk about vendor lock in! Take the internet away you are doomed, slow down the internet you are doomed, have an argument with a senior at one of the 3 cloud vendors your systems are doomed or better your data sold to your competitor. And this wonderful Digital IDs your governments want to implement….all backed by the same 3 vendors. Be very cautious for what you wish for……
Thank you for your post! I couldn’t agree more. The future of computing was shown more than 40 years when the PC revolution brought decentralization and real freedom. The cloud computing is very similar to the mainframe of the past and although useful, I don’t think it will be the one-and-only way. The future is hybrid.
Really interested to get to see some info on how this will affect SSRS in Microsoft’s Dynamics, if anyone who know anything about that I would love to hear about it.
As far as I know, yes, you can move SSIS packages to Azure Data Factory: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/tutorial-deploy-ssis-packages-azure
What does “free licensing for PBI RS” mean here?
Can we install it on separate servers to SQL itself and not have to license those additional cores? Or does “free” only cover same-server installs?
According to a Microsoft rep I spoke with, the “free” license is applicable only when installed as part of SQL Server 2025 installation.
Cheers
So not any different really to right now – we can install SSRS/PBIRS alongside SQL Server and not need to double up on the cores.
So anyone designing this correctly (e.g. not installing alongside SQL Server) will not get anything free. Terrible phrasing from Microsoft.
Thanks for confirming.
Power BI Report Server 2025 (on premises) allows features like linked reports (tested by migrating from SSRS 2019), maybe the service is where these features are not supported
[…] SQL Server Reporting Services is Dead. Is SSIS Next? (Brent Ozar) […]
Uh oh, this needs a big edit! I wanted to send this as a LinkedIn message but it seems I need premium for that.
First, migrating from SSRS to PBIRS is a walk in the park. The experience is nearly identical as migrating SSRS to another machine. Every single thing that SSRS can do, PBIRS can do. This is a HUGE win for customers. They got a massive huge upgrade. They now have an SSRS instance that can run Power BI reports. However, those Power BI reports don’t reach feature parity with their cloud counterpart (Microsoft wants you to go to the cloud, after all).
Further, there are some notes that certain things aren’t supported and there’s a link under the label ”
How to migrate your RDL reports to PBIRS” to justify that. However, the link actually takes you to a migration guide for paginated reports with a destination of the Power BI service. That’s where those limitations live. It has zero applicability to PBIRS.
>> The experience is nearly identical as migrating SSRS to another machine.
Not a walk in the park in my epxerience.
Does PBIRS support exporting an entire report to Excel or PDF yet? It had been my understanding that you can currently only export or print the current page from PBIRS. Forcing a move to the off-premise service is very worrisome.
Not everyone is an “enterprise” client of Microsoft’s platforms. We don’t use PowerBI, don’t need to. We do need “reporting.” And, that reporting needs to be delivered via a custom website (we don’t use ReportManager as we need to control who sees what, has access to what reports, has limited access to parameters, etc.). We simply put up our own web page based UI and then use ReportViewer to render reports that can be easily exported to PDF or CSV/Excel. And… perhaps just as important, we don’t have to handle complex, expensive licensing as we have an internet-facing (b2b) web portal for our clients.
All businesses need “reporting.” We (currently) think the whole PowerBI thing is way too complicated (go figure) and too expensive. But that seems to be a recurring theme for Microsoft now. We will need to hang tight to SQL 2022 for now and start looking for alternatives.
(We also use SSIS, but with enough custom coding, I suppose we can work around it. It shifts the burden, however, from a person competent in “authoring” (SSRS and SSIS) to a “coder.”)
Methinks Microsoft’s people that work in the MECM (SCCM) area are going to be very unhappy about this as MECM relies heavily on SSRS for the admin client to work.
I don’t see this as SSRS is deprecated, as the “PBI Report Server” is SSRS with bells on.
As for SSIS, I do think it’s on shaky ground as MSFT tries to push / entice us to the Cloud. But the changes coming in 2025 don’t really indicate any actual intent to sunset SSIS, except for 1.
It’s the last one that surprises me, deprecating the Microsoft Connector for Oracle. It replaced Attunity’s Oracle component, and after some teething issues was actually better than the Attunity component, at least IMHO. Not massively confident that the ADO.Net component will perform nearly as well as the dedicated connector. I’m more than aware how finickity working with Oracle can be. And I’m sure the Fabric offering will be fantastic. Fortunately my need to pull data from our Oracle HR system is should be gone in about 9 months time.
So it’s this last one that really feels like SSIS’s end is in sight. Everything else being deprecated is a logical step. But the Microsoft Connector for Oracle is relatively new, no 3rd party licencing, and works really well. Other than it being an Enterprise feature, what’s not to love about it? And how much support does it actually need?
I’m just glad I won’t have to deal with a transition.
SSIS is pretty awful these days as for example if you have rows of data where the length of the content in cells in some rows can be quite small, say under 250 characters and then some later rows may have cells that contain 2k characters then you either end up with truncation or failure. If your destination is an Excel file you want to re-create each time then it just resets the lengths unless you leave a very long first record in the file and delete all the rest.
You have to modify the registry to get it to take into account all rows of data otherwise it just checks the first handful and assumes this is representative of the lengths of everything else. It also can’t handle records in Excel with a mix of data types where some are saved as text and others are numbers. You just end up with NULLS instead.
I got so fed up with it I realised it was faster for me to create my own C# tool to do it rather than create an SSIS package using the existing tool.
I provided it on GitHub free if anyone would like to use it: https://github.com/robinwilson16/ExcelSQLExporter
Well, SSIS has unofficially already been deprecated. I have been looking for a job for the last several months and I can’t get one because everyone is only hiring people with experience with Fabric, which I do not have. No one is hiring for SSIS.
Sorry to hear that, Pablo. I would check with Andy Leonard of Enterprise DNA – he may have a lead on positions available, since he specializes in SSIS.
Wow, I was not expecting this kind of help. I was only expressing frustration. Thanks for the tip.
.. and happy new year!