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Astek Mauritius
Reporting Services Tutorial
An Introduction to Microsoft SQL ServerReporting Services
Table of Contents
1.
Introduction
1
2.
Architecture
2
3.
Reporting Services System Requirements and Installation
6
4.
Programming Reporting Services
7
5.
Report Manager
20
6.
Parameterized Repor
ts
25
7.
Calling Stored Procedures from Reports
28
8.
The Report Viewer Control
39
9.
Us
ing Charts in Microsoft SQL Server 2000
45
Reporting Services
10.
Conclusion
76
11.
References and Further Readings
77
Astek Mauritius
Reporting Services Tutorial
1
1.
I
ntroduction
Business Intelligence is a thriving discipline in the marvelous era of computing
we live in. It's the process of analyzing and exploring the information, trends and
pa
tterns hidden in data. BI escalates the business roadmap and facilitates
business users to deliver better strategic solutions. This process helps enterprise
decision makers by providing data models, statistical analysis, forecasting for
comprehensive data analysis.
Microsoft provides the most comprehensive integrated business intelligence,
data mining, analysis and reporting solution with its state of the art Microsoft SQLServer Analysis services and Microsoft SQL Server reporting services. With the
moder
n architecture design based on XML web services, SQL Server ReportingServices provides highly flexible, scalable, customizable and high performance
reporting solution in a cost effective way. This is a developer's introduction to
SQL server reporting services, its functionality and how it can be used to providestate of the art reporting solutions.SQL Server Reporting Services, due to its robust but user friendly architecture, isan obvious choice for Enterprise or in
-
house reporting, for product managem
ent,
sales, and human resource and finance departments. Its flexibility makes it an
ideal for usage in applications as well. Reporting Services offer various deliverymethods, from ftp to email and it provides various rendering formats therefore it
makes a
dds easiness to business to business reporting. Similarly because of its
flexibility and industry standard security model, it makes extranet and secure
internet reporting easily achievable.
Astek Mauritius
Reporting Services Tutorial
2
2. Architecture
The reporting system comprises
of
two main
components
namely:
1.
Report
Server & Report Server Database
Report Server is an integrated web service which controls reportgeneration and management. Report Server database is a SQL serverdatabase which is used as data dictionary about reports (catalog
ue,
groups) and caching. SQL server agent is used for scheduling the reports.
2.
Report Manager
An ASP.NET based Web interface for managing the reports, setting
security and user permissions.
Report Designer is considered as a part of reporting services
in Microsoft
documentation but because RDL (Report definition language) is an XML basedopen standard, any vendor can implement it and therefore a single tool can't becategorized as report designer. However, Microsoft provides a graphical report
authorin
g tool with Visual Studio.NET 2003 for creating reports which
automatically creates RDL markup at the backend.
Reporting services were designed with concept of disparate data sources inmind. A single report can retrieve data from multiple heterogeneous
databases
and render it to make it look like it's from a single source. It provides built
-
in
windows authentication security however one can write custom security wrapper
to fit particular enterprise needs. With SQL Server reporting services, multiple
deli
very methods and formats work like a charm. You design a generic report and
reporting
server takes care of exporting it into HTML, Excel, PDF,
war (web
archive)
.
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