Reporting Services Architecture - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 64

Reporting Services will not be able to function without the ReportServerTempDB
database.

The following table lists some of the tables in the ReportServer database and their related functions.

Table Name Function

ChunkData Stores report definition and data for session cached reports and cached

instances.

ExecutionCache Stores execution information including timeout for cached instances.

PersistedStream Stores session level rendered output for an individual user.

SessionData Persists individual user session level information, including report

paths and timeouts for given session information.

SessionLock Temporary storage to handle locking of session data.

SnapshotData Stores temporary snapshots.

It is not necessary to back up the data in the ReportServerTempDB.

Execution Information
As mentioned earlier, it is not recommended that you view or modify the underlying SQL Server tables.
It is also very difficult to analyze execution information in the ReportServer database.

However, there is a good deal of information about report execution stored in the ReportServer
database. To make access to this information easier, there is a sample Integration Services package that
will extract report execution data and expose it for reporting.

Along with the Integration Services packages, there are sample reports that demonstrate how to expose
execution information. To access these samples, you must install the Server Management Samples
included in the setup CD.

Report Design
Good report design is core to any reporting platform. If reports are not easy to create and edit, adoption
of the product will suffer. When Reporting Services 2005 was released, Microsoft took an interesting
approach to report design. Essentially, it decided to create a standard that could be extended by third
parties and Microsoft. This standard, know as Report Definition Language (RDL), has opened the door
to a number of outside tool vendors, allowing them to create their own report design utilities. This sec-
tion looks at the different report design options and how they can be leveraged.