Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

Chapter 20. Reporting Services

Microsoft first introduced Reporting Services in January of 2004 under the product name SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services. SQL Server Reporting Services is a server-based report generation environment. It is used to deliver both interactive and printed reports. Since that time it has become an award-winning product (see the Intelligent Enterprise Reader's Choice award for Ad-Hoc Query & Reporting, 2004). Reporting Services 2005, in addition to providing several Reporting Services features, provided a tighter integration with Analysis Services with the ability to build reports easily using MDX and DMX query designers. Reporting Services servers 2000 and 2005 were hosted inside IIS. The Reporting Services 2008 server has been re-architected for scalability. Reporting Services 2008 is no longer hosted inside IIS. It is now based on components that provide high scalability for the database server. The Reporting Services service component is also streamlined so that rendering, Web Service enablement, and background processing (scheduling, subscriptions, delivery, and others) scale in proportion because they use a common memory management and application domain management substrate. More importantly, Reporting Services has become a critical part of many Business Intelligence solutions. Query, Reporting, and Analytics are the basis for classic Business Intelligence solutions. With SQL Server Reporting Services 2008, you can not only create tabular and ...