Reporting Services Architecture - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 47

❑ Report security settings.

❑ Report caching options.

❑ Report execution schedules.

❑ Report delivery schedules (subscriptions).

The management phase is generally performed by system administrators. Most of the user access to
reports is defined in this phase.

Delivery
The delivery phase consists of end users accessing reports. There are two common delivery concepts for
accessing reports: push delivery and pull delivery. Push delivery consists of reports being sent to the end
user. This might include e-mails, files moved to a file share, or reports sent directly to a printer. The basic
ideas is that a report is executed on a given schedule and when completed, it is sent to the user. Push
delivery on the other hand consists of the end user accessing some sort of application containing reports.
This could be a web portal such as SharePoint or simple links in a custom-built application. Below are
some common features of the delivery phase:

❑ End user interface for report browsing.

❑ Scheduled report distribution.

❑ Parameter selection.

❑ Multiple output formats.

A good reporting platform will support both push and pull delivery and the ability to embed delivery
functions into custom applications.

Now let's take a deeper look at the physical architecture of Reporting Services 2005.

Reporting Services 2005
This section covers the core components of Reporting Services 2005. This discussion will provide you
with a better understanding of the pieces that must come together to create an overall reporting solution.

Platform Overview
As you saw in the previous section, the reporting platform can be broken into three main phases: author-
ing, management, and delivery. Now you'll take a look specifically at Reporting Services 2005 and see
how the platform encompasses these three phases.

The first thing we need to identify is that Reporting Services really is a platform. Microsoft has created a
tool that provides the infrastructure for building robust reporting solutions. This platform consists of a few
major components: Reporting Services XML Web service, Report Server, and Reporting Services Catalog. In
this section, you will be primarily concerned with functionality that enables the managements and delivery
phases of the reporting lifecycle. The next section discusses the features that support authoring.