Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Programming

17.1. Reporting Services 101

Odds are that you've already generated some reports in your day. They may have been paper reports off a printer (perhaps in something as rudimentary as Access's reporting area — which is actually one of the best parts of Access to me). They may have been off a rather robust reporting engine such as Crystal Reports. Even if you haven't used tools that fancy, one can argue that handing your boss the printout from a stored procedure is essentially a very simple (and not necessarily nice looking) report — I would tend to agree with that argument.

The reality, however, is that our managers and coworkers today expect something more. This is where Reporting Services comes in. Reporting Services really has two different varieties of operation:

• Report models — This is making use of a relatively simple, Web-driven interface that is meant to allow end users to create their own simple reports.

• Reports generated in Visual Studio — While this doesn't necessarily mean you have to write code (you can actually create simple reports using drag and drop functionality — something we'll do in this chapter as an example — you can design fairly robust reports.

Note that, while your users can eventually access these reports from the same Reporting Services Web host, they are based on completely different architectures (and, as you will see, are created in much different fashions).

In addition, Reporting Services provides features for pre-generating reports (handy if the queries ...