Reporting Services Architecture - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 61

File Share
Reports can also be delivered directly to a file share. For this, Reporting Services must have write per-
missions to the share. You can specify credentials to use when sending reports to a file share.
Custom Delivery Extensions
Along with the supported extensions, Reporting Services allows for the creation of custom delivery
extensions. Some of the common delivery extensions we have come across include printer delivery
extensions. One client had to print a large number of reports every month, approximately 200,000. We
created an extension that interfaced directly with the printer delivery and was able to effectively process
all reports each month.
Security
The final component you will look at is the Reporting Services security extensions. Reporting Services
relies on security extensions to handle both authentication and authorization. The default security exten-
sion in Reporting Services supports Windows authentication. In a number of scenarios, this is an accept-
able method. However, there are those solutions that cannot rely on users' having a trusted Windows
account.
In one client scenario, we were working with a solution provider that sold a hosted web application. The
client was interested in providing reporting through Reporting Services over the Internet. The client's
solution implemented its own authentication and authorization logic. To implement Reporting Services,
we needed to hook into this authentication and authorization logic. Our final solution included a custom
security extension that called the client's application logic to authenticate a user. Once we had the user's
authentication information, we could easily implement different types of security within our solution.
Often, developers are hesitant to create their own security extension. We have seen that many people try
to implement their own type of security logic on top of reporting services instead of working with the
security extensions. It has been our experience that working around the security model instead of within
it usually represents more work and less functionality. By implementing a Reporting Services security
extension, you take advantage of the platform architecture and can implement all of the Reporting
Services features that hook into it.
Reporting Services Windows Service
Another major component of Reporting Services is the Reporting Services Windows service. One of the
major functions of this service is the execution of scheduled tasks. Entries are written to the Event table
in the ReportServer database using SQL Server Agent. By default, the Reporting Services Windows
service queries this table every 10 seconds. Once it finds an entry, it performs any processing required by
the event.
Reporting Services Catalog
Reporting Services relies on SQL Server for storing its metadata. This allows for greater scalability in
large reporting applications. This also allows you to take advantage of features inherent to SQL Server
such as backup and transaction logging.
Reporting Services uses two SQL Server databases to store data: ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB.
In the next section, you look at each database and learn how they are used.