What is a data set in SSRS?
Once we have defined a data source, we can create multiple reports on top of it. Each report may have a different type of data to show or different query to fetch the data. Data set helped us to define those unique concepts for each report. Data sets are the query designer where you can write your SQL syntax or connect to already existing data objects in underlying data sources. Let’s say if you have a table ‘dbo.sales’ and you wanted to show case the outcome of sales by product category, then you can either write down your own query at data set level else, you can create a view in sql server and consume that view directly inside the SSRS data set. Consider below screenshot, multiple options to write down queries are highlighted:
