Reporting Services for SQL Server Express discontinued

One surprise in the release plans for SQL Server 2025 is that SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is being discontinued as a brand. If you have a paid license for SQL Server, you are now able to install Power BI Report Server. Previously, that option required you to have an Enterprise Edition license for SQL Server or a premium level license for Power BI.

But Reporting Services was also previously available for SQL Server Express. That will no longer be supplied, and there’s no option to use Power BI Report Server.

Rationale of SSRS for Express Edition

I remember very clearly the discussions we had with the SQL Server team many, many years ago, when SSRS wasn’t available for SQL Server Express. It took quite a while for the management of the SQL Server product group to agree to supply it.

But it’s a free product was the comment. And if we don’t supply it, everyone will upgrade to Standard Edition instead.

That simply wasn’t true. There are a large number of customers who needed reporting for Express. In my own case, I was running a software house, and we had applications that we shipped where we were deploying against SQL Server. But we used Express Edition to get a foot in the door of some smaller customers, and we also used it as a trial system for all customers who wanted to try out our applications.

If a software house wants to support everything from Express to Enterprise, they aren’t going to write a separate set of reports for Express. They’re just going to use a different reporting product for all editions.

And having Express as a starting point for small customers was great. The quickest and easiest upgrade you’d ever get customers to agree to, was when they’d run out of space or resources on Express. By then, they’re already committed to using the product.

Another common scenario was to provide reporting for users who were using Express Edition systems (e.g., point of sale systems) that were connected to central Standard or Enterprise Edition systems.

What SSRS provided for Express

Microsoft didn’t want to supply a free reporting solution for the world, so the Express Edition of SSRS was knobbled. It didn’t have a few higher-level features like data-driven subscriptions but we had workarounds for that.

The key restriction was that it could only use the local copy of Express as a data source. You couldn’t install SSRS on Express and then use it as your Oracle reporting tool for free.

That seemed entirely reasonable.

Disappointing outcome

Removing SSRS from Express Edition seems a disappointing, and I’d suggest short-sighted, decision from the team. I wish they hadn’t decided to do this. It’s as if they forgot all the discussions that led to it being added to the product in the first place.

And in the end, it’s just a marketing decision.

Upgrade options for SSRS users on Express Edition

The best option I can suggest for people who have been using SSRS on Express is to just migrate to only using the RDLC report viewer. Instead of deploying the report server, you need to have your application take control.

You do this by:

Including an RDLC viewer control in your application
Removing any SQL queries that were in your SSRS report, and recreating them as datasets in your application
Importing your SSRS reports into the RDLC designer
Connecting the datasets to the RDLC report in code.

Once you’ve done this, you can continue to use SSRS reports hosted within your Express Edition database. And as a bonus, you can then use SSRS reports that have alternate data sources i.e., not just the local Express Edition. We regularly use this when working with Azure SQL Database (which also doesn’t have SSRS).

You won’t end up with the SSRS portal, but otherwise, you should be in a fairly good position. We’ve been doing this with reports for a long time and find it very useful.

Note also that there are new RDLC viewer and designer controls for Visual Studio 2026, as I described here .

2025-12-10