A discussion of how Reporting
Services and PerformancePoint Server interact will close out the chapter.
Creating Reports with Reporting Services
Reporting Services reports are created through the Business Intelligence
Development Studio, or BIDS, which is simply a version of Visual Studio that has
templates for business intelligence projects. If it seems strange that the reports are
created in a tool specifically geared to developers, you should understand that there
is an end-user tool, called the Report Builder, for performing ad-hoc queries.
Reporting Services ships with SQL Server 2005 and today requires Internet
Information Services (IIS) to be running on the server. Microsoft has announced that
SQL Server 2008 will drop Reporting Services??™ requirement for IIS, meaning that
Reporting Services will be handling its own requests and supplying the results to the
calling applications. Today, however, the installation of Reporting Services checks
for IIS and configures a couple of virtual directories: one for the reports themselves,
and one for the management site, called the Report Manager.
While Reporting Services is often used when reporting against relational
databases, this discussion will focus primarily on using Reporting Services to access
a cube. This is in no way intended to diminish Reporting Services??™ strength as a
relational reporting tool, but since most PerformancePoint scorecards and charts are
built off of cubes, and PerformancePoint??™s planning module can generate forecast
C h a p t e r 1 0 : S Q L S e r v e r R e p o r t i n g S e r v i c e s 319
cubes, it??™s reasonable that one of the primary uses for Reporting Services will be to
access cubes in the organization.
Pages:
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406