Reporting Services Architecture - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 59

Now that you have seen the Scheduling and Delivery Processor, you'll next explore some of the features
that make it work.
Scheduling
Reporting Services 2005 has the ability to create sophisticated execution schedules for reports. When creating
a delivery schedule, Reporting Services stores the schedule information in the Report Server database. It also
creates an SQL Server Agent job referencing the schedule. Both users and administrators can define
schedules for report execution and delivery.
Subscriptions
Subscriptions deal with the mode in which reports are delivered to the end user on a given schedule.
Users can have reports delivered via e-mail, a file share, or a customized delivery extension. There are
three different types of subscriptions available in Reporting Services: standard subscriptions, data-
driven subscriptions, and event-based subscriptions. In this section, you look at the three different types
of subscriptions.
Standard Subscriptions
Individual user subscriptions can be created through SQL Management Studio, Report Manager, or a
custom application via the Reporting Services Web service. When setting up a standard subscription,
information such as parameter values and rendering format can be set along with a schedule for report
delivery.
With standard subscriptions, users can define their own schedule for receiving a report. This is important
for small-scale reports and gives users a great deal of freedom in how they receive certain information.
Data-Driven Subscriptions
Data-driven subscriptions allow for scaling out a report subscription. Subscriptions can be created for a
large number of users and include different rendering parameters, report parameters, and delivery
options for each individual. This allows you to create a very customized report experience for users with
a minimal amount of work.
Think of a large retail organization where each store in the organization has a store manager. Each week the
store manager receives the sales numbers from the previous week. The report is identical for each manager
except for the reference to the actual store. So, using data-driven subscriptions, you could dynamically set
the store report parameter for each report and then e-mail individual reports to each manager. In the end,
you have created only one report but quickly tailored it for a number of different users.
Setting up data-driven subscriptions is very straightforward. Similar to a standard subscription, you
have two main sets of data to configure for the subscriptions: report information including parameters
and delivery information such as an e-mail address. Data-driven subscriptions use a relational table to
store the report and delivery information. Because it is stored in a relational table, you can customize it
for each record that is created.
In both standard and data-driven subscriptions, the delivery of these reports is event-driven. In the next
section, you look at the two types of delivery events.