Introduction Of SQL Server Reporting Service And Its Advantages

In this blog, I am going to explain about SQL server reporting service and its uses. We all know that report is a very useful functionality for every application. Basically, Report is used to give collective information to application users and hence, it holds an utmost importance.

About SSRS Report

SSRS is a well-known reporting service as it stands for SQL server reporting service. SSRS is an application with a lot of features that provides report design, development, testing and deployment of reports by the use of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) developer tool for all its operations.

SSRS is a set of readymade tools, that helps you to create, deploy and manage reports. We can extend reporting functionality using C# and VB as programming languages. SSRS (Microsoft) or SSRS (Business Intelligence), let’s start with the creation of very rich reports (Tabular/Graphical/Interactive/free-form) from multiple data sources with a very rich data visualization (Charts, Maps, sparklines). All these reports can be viewed via a web browser.

SSRS allows the reports to be exported in various formats (Excel, PDF, word etc). SSRS allows reports to be delivered via emails or dropped to a share location in an automated fashion. SSRS provides a host of security features, in order to control, who sees which reports etc.

Versions of reporting service

Reporting Services was first released in 2004 as an add-on to SQL Server 2000. Subsequent versions have been:

  • Second version with SQL Server 2005 in November 2005
  • Third as part of SQL Server 2008 R2 in April 2010

Advantages of reporting service (SSRS)

Below are some of the top advantages of our reporting service:

  1. Easy to deploy – Reports are centralized, users can run reports from one place and having centralized reports also means that report deployment is quite simple.
  2. Easy export for further analysis with multiple file formats – SSRS supports rendering to most common file formats including HTML, PDF, CSV, XML, and Image and also offers complete rendering in Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office Excel.
  3. Report will run based on your timing via Report Subscription – SSRS supports standard as well as data-driven subscriptions, enabling the automatic delivery of reports to the right users by pushing them directly to each user via email or by sending them to a file share from where users can pull the reports. Users can use standard subscriptions to have reports delivered to them based on a custom schedule and specified report parameter values.
  4. Dig-Drill reporting– Without any kind of change, customization or programming, users can easily seamlessly drill through any combination of data in the database.
  5. Normal Intuitive display options– Every time Users have different requirements and expectations whenever they viewing and interacting with reports, and a report format always works well for one kind of data that might not be appropriate for other kinds of data. SSRS supports a number of display options, enabling you to create reports that display data in the most suitable layout for the users including a list, chart, table, or matrix format.
  6. Windows Security in SSRS-SSRS keeps enough safety and security of company data. It provides role-based security to protect reporting resources that protect to access production of data.

Architecture of reporting service

  • In SSRS HTTP module responsible for monitoring incoming requests directed to HTTP. SYS on a specified port on the local computer. The host and port name are on URL  reserved when you configure the server.
  • Report Manager that provides a browser-based interface which is used for managing Reporting Services.
  • The Web Service which implements in an application; provides a programmatic interface to Reporting Services in SQL server reporting server.

Brief about Report Server

The SQL server reporting service server is a stateless server that uses the SQL Server Database Engine to store metadata and object definitions. In a native mode, SQL server reporting server installation uses a couple of databases to separate persistent data storage from temporary storage requirements. By default name used in the database server are reportserver and reportservertempdb, respectively.

Each report server database uses a related temporary database to store session and execution data, cached reports, and work tables that are generated by the report server. The process used in Background server will periodically remove older and the item which is not in use from the tables in the temporary database.

Reporting Services does not re-create the temporary database if it is missing, nor does it repair missing or modified tables. Except for this temporary database never contain the data which already exist, you should back up a copy of the database anyway so that you can avoid having to re-create it as part of a failure recovery operation. If you back up the temporary database and subsequently restore it, you should delete the contents. Usually, it is always safe to delete the contents temporary database at any time. Whenever we should restart the RS(Reporting server) windows service after you delete the contents.

A Reporting Services report server supports two modes of deployment for report server instances:

  • Native Mode in SSRS: In the native mode in SQL server reporting server it includes the web part of the sharepoint, we have also a reporting service server that runs as an application server that provides all processing and it also provides the management ability to exclusively through SSRS (SQL server reporting servers) component.
  • SharePoint mode in SSRS: Share point is installed as a part of sharepoint server farm.Deploy and configure SharePoint mode by using PowerShell commands or SharePoint content management pages. As we know that SSRS we can’t do switching from modes example we can’t switch from one mode to another mode. Whenever we want to change the type of report server then copy and move it to the report items or report server database from the older version report server to the new report server. This process is known as migration process. The migration is dependent on the mode you are migrating to and the version you are migrating from.

Conclusion

I hope this article will help you understanding about SQL server reporting service its advantage and architecture. In my next blog, I will describe how to create a report using SQL server reporting service.

Your comments and feedback’s are highly appreciated. Thanks!

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