I'm developing Reporting services on VS2005 and have to connect to SQL Server 2008. The following Error occurs: "This server version is not supported. You must have Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 or later."
I found on the net a patch for it, but it doesn't work (link to patch)
"The upgrade patch cannot be installed by the Windows Installer Service because the program to be upgraded is missing, or the upgrade patch may update a different version of the program."
what else can I do ? :(
Reporting Services are very different between 2005 and 2008. You'll need to use the 2008 tools to develop reports for 2008. You can just use the Business Intelligence Studio which comes with SQL Server 2008 - this uses Visual Studio 2008 anyway. I'm fairly sure the patch you've got won't add support for SQL Server Reporting Services 2008.
If you need to use the Reports from Visual Studio 2005, you'll need to use SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 (it is actually possible to install this alongside SQL Server 2008). I've had a separate problem which means my reports won't work on SSRS 2008, but I've switched to SQL Server 2008. I'm successfully running SSRS2005 connecting to a SQL2008 Database.
I wanted to add to this a handy workaround I found if you're in a particular situation. You can actually use Visual Studio 2005 and create SSRS 2005 reports and still pull from SQL 2008 data. This can be done as long as you have one server in your environment running SQL 2005 still.
You just need to create a linked server for your 2008 servers. Then, in SSRS, you create one data source to your 2005 server, but reference the 2008 linked server in your query, and it'll work. For example, if you have a SQL 2008 server called Chicago and a SQL 2005 server called Detroit, you'd create a linked server on Detroit for Chicago, and you'd create a data source in Visual Studio 2005 for your report that would point to Detroit. Then, in your query, you'd just have something like SELECT * FROM Chicago.Database.dbo.Table and it should work.
Obviously you'll probably want to switch to a 2008 environment altogether, but this is a nice thing to know for the conversion phase.
Hope that helps.
Just in case anyone else runs into this, my issue was that the custom software that runs the ssrs reports only supported ssrs 2005 reports and it also used a sql 2008 database so I couldn't upgrade to BIDS 2008.
I was able to run the patch in the ops link once I installed visual studio 2005 professional then bids 2005 on top of that.
Seems the sql 2008 patch doesn't pick up bids 2005 stand alone.
