Learning SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

Description

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 is the third generation Microsoft reporting software that is more tightly integrated with SQL Server 2008 than ever before. It provides a complete server-based platform that is designed to support a wide variety of reporting needs, including managed enterprise reporting, special purpose reporting, embedded reporting, and web-based reporting.

Ideal for beginners who need to create reports as quickly as possible, this book will lead you through practical examples to teach you a full range of skills for reporting with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services. A series of carefully picked exercises help you practice the most important aspects of report creation. By the end of the book, you will have the confidence to take on the most complex of reports, and be producing reports that will make you the envy of your organization.

CONTENTS:

Chapter 1 - An overview detailing the requirements and major highlights of the Reporting Services.

Chapter 2 - Presents the salient architectural details and describes the details of how the different elements of the reporting services fit together to deliver end-to-end support for reporting.

Chapter 3 - Discusses details regarding the usage of Report Viewer Controls, covering both web and Windows forms applications.

Chapter 4 - Discusses the built-in features in Visual Studio 2008 to generate server-based reports and report models. It also describes importing MS Access reports.

Chapter 5 - Describes Report Manager and some of the basic tasks that can be carried out with this tool as well as Email, File Share, and Data Driven subscriptions.

Chapter 6 - This chapter describes the Report Builder 2.0 interface together with the new features that are incorporated into this version. It also describes charts and gauges and their inclusion in reports.

Chapter 7 - This chapter describes the various kinds of reports that one can build using the standalone tool Report Builder 2.0. It also describes data originating in SQL Server, SQL Analysis Server and Report Models.

Chapter 8 - This chapter describes a number of programming interfaces available to work with the SQL Server Reporting Services. Using these interfaces facilitates integration and maintenance of reports into web and Windows applications and configuring reporting services.

Chapter 9 - This chapter describes Crystal Report 2008 and its integration with SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 using a number of examples.

Chapter 10 - Programmatic generation of reports is always a very useful feature as it draws upon the complete API. This chapter deals with creating a report using code that calls the API procedures and also presents an introduction to the.

Appendix A - This appendix describes the different sources of data that are used in Reporting Services. It also describes the differences between SQL Queries, MDX, and Semantic queries and presents how each of them is supported in the Query Designer.

Appendix B - This appendix describes the conversion of RDL to RDLC and RDLC to RDL. Presently this is limited to only RDLC to RDL conversion.

Appendix C - This appendix describes the rs.exe command-line and also describes the tools rsconfig and rskeymgmt.

Appendix D - This appendix details some of the major references and links to online references.