I'm a non-IT home-grown "citizen developer" of SQL reports who just got my organization to give me access to SSMS as an upgrade to Report Builder (3.0 for the last few years, but we just upgraded one of our SQL Servers from 2012 to 2019, so I had just moved to the most recent version, which had some good stuff, but drove me nuts because it no longer gave me the line number for SQL syntax errors for troubleshooting).

I've launched SSMS for the first time and managed to connect to the database server and tried executing a query that I know works from Report Builder, but in SSMS it's giving me all sorts of syntax errors. It looks like it's not recognizing any of my table names, so although I see the database in the Object Explorer, it looks like the query isn't connected to that database.

This is just proving that I'm going to need a bit of a leg up to make this tool useful.

Anyone here successfully made the transition from report builder to SSMS and can recommend some good resources to get started?

Thanks!

Update: Figured out the initial error; needed to preface my table names with database name. I figure this is because in Report builder, you select the database (as data source) associated with the query, but SSMS let's you query across databases...?

New question: now that I can pull in existing queries, is there any way to edit my report layout from Report Builder in SSMS to use it as a starting point?