Chapter 3. Reporting Services Installation

To gain familiarity with Reporting Services, developers and administrators often perform a basic installation to a personal computer or development server. Although the basic installation glosses over many of the choices critical in an enterprise deployment, it provides an environment in which features and the installation process itself can be explored. Such an environment is ideal for performing the exercises and tutorials found in Books Online and within this book.

In this chapter, you will be guided through a basic installation of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services. Then you will review some important considerations for an enterprise deployment.

The Basic Installation

To understand the installation of Reporting Services, it is important to have some knowledge of its components. At its core, Reporting Services is a Windows service that relies on a pair of databases hosted by an instance of the SQL Server Database Engine. Interaction with the Reporting Services Windows service is provided through applications such as Report Manager, hosted by Reporting Services, and other applications such as the Business Intelligence Development Studio, installed on client systems. These applications, the Windows service, and the Reporting Services databases are explored in greater detail in Chapter 4.

With the basic installation, server- and client-side components are installed on a single system. The Reporting Services databases are also installed to a ...

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