Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Reporting with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

11.3. Managing Data Sources

A data source contains all the connection information for a dataset used in a report. As you have seen in several chapters of this book, data sources can be created for a specific data set or may be shared and repurposed among different reports. Typically, most of the reports in a Business Intelligence application get their data from a common data repository; hence, they can leverage a common set of connectivity characteristics. In Chapter 9, you learned how shared data sources can be advantageous by minimizing administrative overhead and by simplifying the deployment process.

By introducing data connection libraries in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft introduced another feature with a reusability goal in mind. Data connection libraries were designed with one primary objective: to abstract data connection settings from the dependant files. Although a data connection library is not required for publishing your Reporting Services data sources, it is always a good idea to have all of your connection files grouped in one place.

Note that a data connection library not only can contain Reporting Services data sources; it can also contain an Office Data Connection (ODC) file or an Universal Data Connection (UDC) file used by Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 and Excel Services, as shown in Figure 11-7. For example, InfoPath 2007 uses data connections that conform to the Universal Data Connection (UDC) file schema and typically have either a ...