Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

How This Book Is Organized

To help you find what you need quickly, this book is divided into seven parts. Each part covers a certain topic about using Microsoft Reporting Services 2005. Whenever you need help, just flip through this book, find the part that covers the topic you’re looking for, and then toss this book aside and get back to work.

Part I: Just the Basics

Microsoft Reporting Services 2005 is a powerful reporting platform that requires an introduction to the basics of Web-based reporting. The key considerations of reporting are described as an introduction.

I provide a quick summary of some database concepts to give you a refresher on database access. Because you’ll be querying database tables for information to report, you need to be aware of how to access tables and what SQL queries are all about. With this knowledge, you’re ready to begin to build reports.

Part II: Building Reports — Your Creativity Options

Microsoft provides a simple interface for constructing reports quickly with a Report wizard. A first pass through this wizard provides a glimpse of the steps required to assemble a report from scratch.

As all carpenters have tool belts to provide quick access to tools for con­struction, Microsoft Reporting Services provides a toolbox that provides quick access to tools helpful in designing and building reports. SQL has many tools, and I help you get to know the advantages and disadvantage of each in special reporting situations.

Basic actions such as sorting, grouping, and filtering information presented in a report add to your intended users’ understanding of the information to be delivered in your reports. Basic capabilities for producing ad hoc reports (reports you can create quickly on the fly through drag and drop operations) are covered through a description of how the Report Builder tool works.

Part III: Publishing, Accessing, and Subscribing to Reports

Professors in college know the phrase “publish or perish” — they need to publish articles and books to continue their tenure at the college or univer­sity. Well, for other reasons, you also need to know how to publish a report so that others can benefit from your information. You can publish reports so that users can access them whenever they need to. You can also publish reports so that they appear in e-mail messages to business users on a regular basis.

Reports can be pushed to users through e-mail or sent directly to Web sites. Reports can also be pulled by business users who can find the report and desire to see the content on demand. Microsoft Reporting Services 2005 sup­ports both the push and the pull models for report access.

Part IV: Maintaining Your Reports

A Web interface that comes with Reporting Services 2005 manages your reports in folders to make access quick and easy. This interface is the Report Manager. In general, you can publish reports to the Report Manager and manage these reports and who can access them through some security and site settings.

Security is an important topic when sensitive business or personal informa­tion is available on the Web. In this part, I fully explore security options for reports and for the overall Web site. Database security can also provide ways to lock down secure information so that information is provided according to any standards and guidelines that corporations today enforce for business information distribution.

Optimizing the performance of reports can be a consideration if you have many users accessing vast amounts of data at the same time during peak times. If you’re responsible for the overall end-user satisfaction with your reporting facility, you will probably need to remember a few principles for maximizing the execution performance for your reports.

Part V: Developing Advanced Reports

Interactive reports are valuable to users who need to see many facets of the data they’re looking at. Reporting Services lets you drill down from summary information to see greater detail and then shift your view across many parts of the organization with an array of reports that are linked together. Microsoft Reporting Services 2005 enables you to create some interesting linked reports which together provide an intuitive navigation interface to begin exploring information in more detail.

Drilling down to see more detail, showing navigation links on reports which bridge you to other views of the information, and transparently passing para­meters from one view to another are all possible with Reporting Services 2005. You have all the features to provide a report that can be easily understood by an executive and allow for further exploration of the detail.

Part VI: Migrating from Other Reporting Tools

Undoubtedly, before obtaining Microsoft Reporting Services 2005, you have used other tools to provide needed reporting. I have noted some comparisons of Microsoft Reporting Services 2005 with other popular reporting tools. And if you’re used to developing reports in Microsoft Access, you will be interested in learning how to convert Access reports into Reporting Services reports.

Part VII: The Part of Tens

For those people who just want to find shortcuts and tips for working more efficiently with Microsoft Reporting Services 2005 (so they can take the rest of the day off), this part of the book provides some cool tricks, resources you can spot on the Web for more information, more interesting information about the rest of the Microsoft BI platform, and finally a list of third-party tools that further enhance your productivity or extend the capabilities of Reporting Services 2005.

This part is intended as a reference for tips and resources that make Reporting Services 2005 seem a lot easier than the incomprehensible manuals. Just remember that if anything in Reporting Services 2005 confuses you or doesn’t make sense, it’s not your fault — it’s Microsoft’s fault, so feel free to blame these developers for failing to anticipate your needs appropriately and selling you a not-always-intuitive product.
Read comments To Download