Reporting Services 2008 Overview

Reporting Services contains a collection of development tools, programming interfaces, services, and management utilities that support the creation, management, and distribution of reports.

A Reporting Services 2008 installation consists of data storage, report access and processing, and client tiers.

Data storage. This tier includes Reporting Services databases and data sources. Pictured at the bottom left, SQL Server 2008 databases store Reporting Services configuration data and published reports, among other information. One or more (Microsoft or non-Microsoft) data sources supply data for reports.

Report access and processing. Reporting Services 2008 combines previously separate services for report processing and browser-based report access into a single Reporting Services runtime service, as shown in the middle. That service includes Report Manager, a Web application (which does not require Microsoft’s IIS Web server) that allows users to access Reporting Services reports from a Web browser and administrators to control report security settings and set delivery schedules. This service also houses Report Server, which stores and processes report definitions (for example, querying underlying data sources and formatting reports for display), and controls report scheduling and delivery.