AL Part I MA TE RI Getting Star ted Chapter 1: Introducing Reporting Services TE D Chapter 2: Business Intelligence Solutions GH Chapter 3: Reporting Services Installation CO PY RI Chapter 4: Reporting Services Architecture
Introducing Repor ting Ser vices What a long, strange trip it’s been. . . . SQL Server Reporting Services is all grown up now. This product has matured quite a lot over the past five years or so since enjoying a favorable start in the industry. This is our third edition of this book, about a product in its third version.
Part I: Getting Started The Reporting Services Revolution It was during my morning commute that my life and career took a different path because of this product. In 2003, my daily trek to downtown Seattle was by passenger ferry with a group of fellow co-commuters. I had been working on a side project that had a substantial reporting element. It was a web application with a lot of database work that I was developing on my laptop during every spare minute I could muster.
Chapter 1: Introducing Reporting Services We authors have learned a lot about this product with each project and continue to find creative ways to stretch its capabilities. For the first edition of this book, we worked primarily with the betarelease product. The second edition was based on our experience with Reporting Services for SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005.
Part I: Getting Started Approximate Percentage Role Description 15% Business Managers Those who working seriously with Reporting Services, having attended classes or engaged in consulting services. They are mainly interested in the bigger picture: how reports can address their analytical needs and help them make informed decisions. They have little interest in the implementation details or the technology used to make it work. They direct people who can do the detail work.
Chapter 1: Introducing Reporting Services Business Information Workers Software Developers Business Managers System Administrators Figure 1-1 As a software developer, coming to the realization that the largest group of reporting professionals is not the software developer or other technical expert was a wake-up call. As I taught Reporting Services 2000 classes for Microsoft, I often spent a large portion of the classroom time just teaching students to use the Visual Studio user interface.
Part I: Getting Started may have started from a web page and the conferencing application may have been started from your web browser, it was actually running in a client-side application, which you allowed to be installed on your computer, using advanced content-streaming technologies, allowing you to interact with the serverhosted conference. What does this have to do with reporting? Quite a lot, actually.
Chapter 1: Introducing Reporting Services specifications, you save this report to a PDF file and then choose the customer sales inquiry history report. Looking up this customer, you learn that someone named Julie from this very company made an inquiry about two months ago regarding video media backups. Looking around the room, you find a name card with Julie’s name on it.
Part I: Getting Started integrated into a custom desktop application, web application, static web site, or a document or through low-level programming code may appeal to programmers because of the many choices and flexibility. However, to a business user or leader, too many choices may just be confusing and overwhelming. At the end of the day, someone must decide how reports will be used in the business environment and set a standard for most report designers to follow.
Chapter 1: Introducing Reporting Services After a new report has been designed and tested, it can be deployed to a central report server, where it will be available to all users through a simple web browser application called the Report Manager. Beyond Wizard-built reports, many aspects of more complex reports may be managed by creating simple programming expressions.
Part I: Getting Started The actual design work is performed using a client-side builder tool delivered on demand in the user ’s web browser. The user experience is quite simple. As far as the user is concerned, a new report is created using a simple web page selection, and Report Builder opens in a browser window without specifically installing a software package ahead of time. These reports are stored on the server in the same folder space as other reports.
Chapter 1: Introducing Reporting Services Report Builder 2.0 is a stand-alone application that may be installed on the desktop of any user from the SQL Server 2008 installation media, or it may simply be launched from the central Report Manager Web interface. Using this tool to design reports, a user will need permission to read data sources and will also need permission to deploy reports to the report server using this tool.
Part I: Getting Started Figure 1-3 The report design tools are covered in Part II. You’ll learn about the basics beginning in Chapter 5, “Basic Report Design,” and about advanced techniques in Chapter 8, “Advanced Report Design.” In Part III, Chapter 9, “Reporting with Analysis Service,” and Chapter 10, “Report Solutions Patterns and Recipes,” will take you beyond the features and discuss several common business scenarios.
Chapter 1: Introducing Reporting Services Part IV, including Chapter 11, “Report Models,” and Chapter 12, “Report Builder 1.0,” thoroughly covers client-side reporting concepts, data model preparation, and the Report Builder ad hoc design environment. Simple Application Integration There are a few options available for integrating reports into business solutions.
Part I: Getting Started User Interaction and Dynamic Reporting There are many opportunities to use report features that provide a rich user experience. In the past, many reports were nothing more than a list of values with totals. Now reports can be a starting point that can guide users to the information they need to make decisions. Report elements such as text labels, column headers, and chart points can be used to navigate to different report sections and to new reports.
Chapter 1: Introducing Reporting Services Figure 1-5 Intranet and Internet Report Access One of the marvelous things about the SQL Server Reporting Services architecture is that it is based on modern Internet technologies, namely, XML Web services and the .NET Framework. The report server, running under Windows Server Internet Information Services, is essentially a complete web portal. At its core, Reporting Services exposes all its features and capabilities as a web service.
Part I: Getting Started even realize that they are using Reporting Services to view their content. In fact, they may not even realize that they are viewing a report. From the users’ perspective, their experience is simply a convenient and smooth flow of information as they navigate from one simple interface to another, without ever leaving your business solution. Part V will help you explore opportunities for integrating Reporting Services reports into applications and business solutions.
Chapter 1: Introducing Reporting Services Portal Integration As web technologies and products have matured, a new breed of web applications has evolved. Most web sites consist of several HTML page files, which contain mainly text content. Portal frameworks like Microsoft Office SharePoint Services, IBM Websphere, Plumtree, and DotNetNuke have replaced many large, complex web sites.
Part I: Getting Started Figure 1-6 Managing and Customizing the Repor t Ser ver Reports may be delivered in a variety of ways (not just when a user navigates to a report in real time). Reports may be automatically rendered to the server cache so that they open very quickly and don’t burden data sources. They may be delivered via e-mail and to file shares on a regular schedule. Using data-driven subscriptions, reports may be “broadcast” to a large audience during off-hours.
Chapter 1: Introducing Reporting Services powerful capabilities enable you to address specialized requirements and to direct application developers to develop custom extensions. As a system administrator, you learn to enable custom extensions and define appropriate security allowances to enable custom extensions to run on your report server.
