I'm right now at Redmond in the Microsoft HQ attending a SQL Server 2008 TPrep. There are a bunch of new things for developers, DBAs and Business Intelligence. One of the biggest changes in the BI space is in Reporting Services. There are a huge bunch of changes that allows you to create much more flexible & richer reports easier and faster. Here are some of them:

• A new Report Designer tool that is aimed at end / office users with a new interface with the Office 2007 Ribbon and other UI changes. This allows non-technical users to quickly create reports without delving into the technical stuff.
• A new data formatting control called the Tablix. This is something that designers the ability to use the best features of both the Table and Matrix controls.
• Better rendering support for Excel and CSV export types
• A new MS Word export rending option
• LOTS of new charting options - including:
  • Stepped Line, Range Area, Range Bar/Column, Funnel, Pie Callout, Pyramid, Polar, Error and Radar
  • Secondary X- and Y- axes
  • WYSIWYG chart design control (think Excel charts)
  • Multi Charts
  • Scale Breaks
  • Great new Gauge controls
• Dependency on IIS has been removed - the service uses HTTP.SYS directly

It's great to see the cool, new stuff in the Reporting Services. I'd have liked a couple of other stuff in it as well.

• An auto-format option for the Tablix would have been nice. After all the ASP.NET GridView has them and so do Word and Excel tables.
• An option to allow alternate row formatting for easier reading of reports
• Ability to deploy/install the new Report Designer as a ClickOnce application from the Report manager site
• The Web service endpoint for Reporting Services still remains as ReportServer2005! That's a little nutty I'd say. The name should have been ReportServer2008. Especially since there is a ReportServer2006 that is meant to connect to servers in SharePoint integrated mode. If backward compatibility was such a big deal it would have been trivial to create the ReportServer2008 endpoint and create a wrapper endpoint called ReportServer2005. Explaining this to clients is gonna feel a little stupid! :)