Report Server Administration - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 458

❑ Backup and restore procedures.

❑ Monitoring a Reporting Services instance for best performance.

Your exploration of report server administration begins with a look at the server components and require-
ments. Then I'll address different deployment environments and configuration. Once the environment is
in place, you'll read about backup and restore procedures. The chapter rounds out with approaches to
server monitoring and strategies to increase server performance.

Deploying Reporting Services
There are a number of different types of Reporting Services deployments. The two most common scenar-
ios are single box installation and multiple box deployments.

❑ Installing pretty much everything on a single machine. For smaller organizations and some

development environments, this configuration works great. The machine has IIS and a SQL
Server instance both running locally. For production use, Reporting Services Standard Edition
provides support for most users in this category. One exception to note, however, is that data-
driven subscriptions are not supported in the Standard Edition. Data-driven subscriptions allow
you to broadcast reports to users listed in a database table. For developers, Reporting Services
Developer Edition provides all the capabilities of the Enterprise Edition but isn't suitable for
production machines.

❑ Installing the Report Server on one machine and the Report Server database on another. This

type of installation is common. For example, let's say you already have an existing reporting
infrastructure and want to begin using Reporting Services. In that case, you would run the
Reporting Services setup as usual — but point the installation to your existing SQL Server data
store. Later on, you may need to point the Report Server instance to another database. This type
of installation can also have significant impact on Report Server performance. You'll read much
more about that later in this chapter.

Other common types of installations include adding another Reporting Services instance to a web farm
cluster and performing installations using the command line or script. You'll read more about all of these
in this chapter as well.

When installing Reporting Services, setup allows you to:

❑ Create a new server instance. During a new install, you provide input values that are written

into the Report Server configuration files for retrieval later. Registry keys are added, virtual
directories are created in IIS, new databases are created, and data is encrypted and stored.

❑ Change an existing installation. This will allow you to remove individual components from or

add them to an existing report server instance. If any or all of the components you specify are
already installed, they'll be uninstalled and then reinstalled.

❑ Remove the server components. This will remove all the report server components and machine

changes from the computer, except for files that contain user data. It's important to remember
that the Report Server database and log files remain after running uninstall.

Before I talk about what those deployment configurations look like, let's look at what kinds of bits are
getting deployed.