Angry about Reporting Services

I have seen the odd thread on here that just mentions in passing that data-driven subscriptions are only available on the SQL 2005 Enterprise edition. Does no-one else but me think that this is absolutely disgraceful? We bought SQL Server Standard for our 2 processor server and it cost just under ￡8,000. The only reason we would have to buy Enterprise is for the data-driven subscriptions in RS and that would cost us ￡33,000. When the beta of RS came out, it had data-driven subscriptions at all levels. When RS 2000 came out, we could easily get a legitimate copy of RS 2000 Enterprise from Microsoft and have the same functionality. Now we have to pay ￡25,000 for the privilege or hand-code the whole thing. I repeat; this is an absolutely disgraceful piece of profiteering from Microsoft. Do they really think that data-driven subscriptions are only of value to people using the Enterprise edition?

This forum is intended for assistance and bug reporting with RS. Call customer support if you're that upset about the product. What do you expect them to do? Give it to you for free now because you're angry?

I think it is disgraceful that you would use an open forum to vent about a product that you purchased which is documented as to what it includes and what it does not include.

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I think it's disgraceful that a product which was in all versions of the beta and freely available in SQL 2000, now costs me ￡25,000 in SQL 2005. Don't you?

As I believe this forum is read by Microsoft developers, maybe I thought they could give me a rational response. If you know of a place where I can get a better response, or where I ought to post this, please let me know. It is not my intention to upset anyone on the forum, just to let Microsoft know how I feel about their product.

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Leaving strong words aside, I think your complaint is not unreasonble and it is good to provide this kind of feedback. Crossing the enterprise hefty price tag is not an easy sell especially for vendors. I tend to agree with you we are suffering from an "enterprise" identity crisis and thus the meaning of enerprise should be better scoped out. IMO, enterprise editions should differ only in the areas of scalability and to some extend extensibility in order to meet high loads and more involved integration requirements of large companies. Following this line of thought, I'd say that web farm deployment and partitioning are definately enterprise-level features while features like data-driven subscriptions and semi-additive measures (SSAS) are probably not.

From BOL: "Enterprise Edition scales to the performance levels required to support the largest enterprise online transaction processing (OLTP), highly complex data analysis, data warehousing systems, and Web sites. Enterprise Edition’s comprehensive business intelligence and analytics capabilities and its high availability features such as failover clustering allow it to handle the most mission critical enterprise workloads. Enterprise Edition is the most comprehensive edition of SQL Server and is ideal for the largest organizations and the most complex requirements."