Built on SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

Electronic or printed documents called reports are a common solution for extracting information from databases and presenting that information to users in human-readable form. These reports organize, format, and display data, showing only relevant or useful information, often grouped by categories and ordered in some way, such as alphabetically or by calculated values like “Total Sales.” They may also include charts.

Managed-reporting software typically serves business or technical decision-makers and others who need specific information on a recurring basis, and it enhances reporting beyond what ad hoc query products such as Excel provide. It provides integrated tools for designing reports, generating reports from data, publishing them on the network, and distributing reports to authorized users who need them on an ongoing basis.

First introduced in Jan. 2004 as an managed-reporting add-in for SQL Server 2000, SQL Server Reporting Services is a collection of development tools, programming interfaces, run-time services, and management utilities used to define, generate, store, and manage reports. Reporting Services development tools, hosted in Visual Studio, help developers create report definitions—XML files that identify the data sources to be used in reports, contain the queries that extract data from those sources, and include instructions for formatting and rendering those data in actual reports. Developers publish completed report definitions to Reporting Services’ core server component, the report server. Report servers store report definitions in SQL Server databases, process the report definitions, and control report scheduling and delivery. Users view reports through various mechanisms—most commonly by pointing a Web browser at the Report Manager, a Web-based report portal that ships with Reporting Services, but they can also have reports automatically e-mailed to them.