Introduction Of SSRS In SQL Server 2008

In this article I will give an introduction of SSRS in SQL Server. SSRS stands for SQL Server Reporting Service which is used for business reporting. We use SSRS to design, develop, deploy and manage reports.

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.

 It is a ready to use tool that runs separately in different application domains. SSRS has three main components,

• Databases
• Windows Service
• Report Designer

ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB are the two databases created by Reporting Services. ReportServer database contains  store reports, snapshots and subscriptions. It is centralized location for reporting application data. While ReportServerTempDB stores temporary data. These two databases are automatically created when Reporting Services are configured, you can also create these databases manually.

Reporting Services functionality is implemented as a Windows service.

Report Designer is used to design reports and maintain the report design.