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MS SQL Server Reporting Services and you
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MS SQL Server Reporting Services and you
This article is intented to talk about what all you can expect from SQL Server Reporting Services ( SSRS ). This is in no means going to cover hands on to it, we will see them in seperate article later on. This is a very vast topic but I am going to keep it simple and straight to the point.
What is Reporting Services
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services is a server-based reporting platform that you can use to create and manage tabular, matrix, graphical, and free-form reports that contain data from relational and multidimensional data sources. The reports that you create can be viewed and managed over a World Wide Web-based connection.
Reporting Services includes the following core components:
- A complete set of tools that you can use to create, manage, and view reports.
- A Report Server component that hosts and processes reports in a variety of formats. Output formats include HTML, PDF, TIFF, Excel, CSV, and more.
- An API that allows developers to integrate or extend data and report processing in custom applications, or create custom tools to build and manage reports.
Why Reporting Services
-Supports a wide range of common data sources, such as OLE DB and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC),
-Multiple output formats such as familiar Web browsers and Microsoft Office System applications.
-Implements a flexible, role-based security model to protect reports and reporting resources with Active Directory.
-Provides Web Service interface to interact/embed with other applications
-Using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework, developers can leverage the capabilities of their existing information systems and connect to custom data sources, produce additional output formats, and deliver to a variety of devices.
Various Types of Reporting Needs
- Enterprise Reporting
Using Reporting Services, corporate IT staff can design a variety of reports and deploy them to individuals throughout the enterprise.
- Ad-hoc Reporting
New ad-hoc reporting tool that enables business users to create their own reports and explore corporate data without deep technical understanding of the underlying data sources.
- Embedded Reporting
Access predefined or ad-hoc reports from third-party applications that use Reporting Services and use these reports as-is, customize them, or create new ones for specific business needs.
- Web-based Reporting
Web-based reports to deliver information to customers or partners over intra-net or the Internet.
And needless to say, SSRS takes cares of all of these.
Reporting Life Cycle
Reporting platforms can be evaluated by their support for the following areas—authoring, management, and delivery.
Authoring
The authoring phase is concerned with the actual development.
Authoring generally includes the following features:
- Connecting to a data source
- Writing database queries
- Creating report layout
- Creating report parameters
- Setting report properties such as height and width
These capabilities are important for the initial development of the report. They must be flexible enough to
handle diverse reporting needs and structured enough to be easy to use.
Management
After developing the report, you move into the management phase, which is concerned with setting properties of reports specific to the production environment. These properties include:
- Data source connection information
- Default parameter values
- Security permissions
- Report caching
- Report execution schedules
- Report delivery schedules
Management phase is generally performed by the administrators. Most of the user access to reports is defined in this phase.
Delivery
The delivery phase looks at how reports get to the end users. Delivery includes:
- Providing an end user interface for browsing reports
- Publishing reports on a specific schedule
- Delivering reports to end users
A common concept in reporting platforms is push/pull delivery.
- Push delivery constitutes the reports that are sent to the user.
- Pull delivery constitutes reports that can be accessed on-demand by the user . Users are required to take the effort to get the report information. The report could be emailed to the requestor of the report, or published to a specified file share.
Hardware and Software Requirements
Hardware Requirement
The hardware system requirements for Reporting Services are very similar to those for SQL Server and are mentioned below :
Processor
- Pentium III-compatible processor or higher
- Minimum: 600 MHz Recommended: 1 GHz or higher
RAM
- Minimum: 512 MB
- Recommended: 1 GB or more
- Maximum: Operating system maximum
Disk Space requirement for Reporting Services and Report Manager is 120 MB
Software Requirements
- Microsoft Windows 2000, 2003 & XP
- SQL Server 2005 (with Reporting Services components installed)
- Internet Information Server (IIS) 5.0 +
- Microsoft Framework 2.0
Wrapping up...
This article is intented to share with the basic overview of SSRS and some of its basic capabilities. We may see its demo with capabilities in details later. For more information on SQL Server Reporting services visit official Microsoft Site.
Hope it helps
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Responses
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| Author: narasimha 12 May 2008 | Member Level: Gold Points : 2 | good
| | Author: Sampath Kumar A.E. 13 May 2008 | Member Level: Bronze Points : 2 | Please send more details regarding this, Probably with example to understand more clearly
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