Introduction about SSRS.

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services is a key component of SQL Server 2005. Reporting Services was first released with SQL Server 2000 and provided customers with an enterprise-capable reporting platform with a comprehensive environment for authoring, managing, and delivering reports to the entire organization. Reporting Services in SQL Server 2005 provides additional enterprise reporting capabilities and addresses a new audience—business users who want to interact with data in an ad hoc fashion as well as create their own reports from scratch and to share them with others. In Reporting Services, the requirements of different types of users who want to interact with reports can, for the first time, be addressed with one reporting solution. This document describes the new capabilities in SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.

SQL Server Reporting Services provides a full range of ready-to-use tools and services to help you create, deploy, and manage reports for your organization, as well as programming features that enable you to extend and customize your reporting functionality.

Reporting Services is a server-based reporting platform that provides comprehensive reporting functionality for a variety of data sources. Reporting Services includes a complete set of tools for you to create, manage, and deliver reports, and APis that enable developers to integrate or extend data and report processing in custom applications. Reporting Services tools work within the Microsoft Visual Studio environment and are fully integrated with SQL Server tools and components.

With Reporting Services, you can create interactive, tabular, graphical, or free-form reports from relational, multidimensional, or XML-based data sources. You can publish reports, schedule report processing, or access reports on-demand. Reporting Services also enables you to create ad hoc reports based on predefined models, and to interactively explore data within the model. You can select from a variety of viewing formats, export reports to other applications, and subscribe to published reports. The reports that you create can be viewed over a Web-based connection or as part of a Microsoft Windows application or Share Point site. Reporting Services provides the key to your business data.

SSRS Tutorial: Using Report Designer

Reporting Services includes two tools for creating reports:

• Report Designer can create reports of any complexity that Reporting Services supports, but requires you to understand the structure of your data and to be able to navigate the Visual Studio user interface.

• Report Builder provides a simpler user interface for creating ad hoc reports, directed primarily at business users rather than developers. Report Builder requires a developer or administrator to set up a data model before end users can create reports.