SQL Server Reporting Services

1. Question : What can SQL Server Reporting Services do?

SQL Server Reporting Service is one of the server-based software systems that generate reports developed by Microsoft. It is used for preparing and delivering interactive and variety of printed reports. It is administered through an interface that is web based. Reporting services utilizes a web service interface for supporting and developing of customized reporting applicatons. It can be competed with Crystal Reports and other business intelligent tools.


2. Question : Explain the architecture of reporting services?
Reporting services architecture is comprises of integrated components. It is multi-tiered, included with application, server and data layers. This architecture is scalable and modular. A single installation can be used across multiple computers. It includes the following components:

- Report Manager, Reporting Designer, Browser Types Supported by Reporting services, Report server, Report server command line utilities, Report Server Database, Reporting Services Extensibility, Data sources that is supported by Reporting Services.



3. Question : Describe Reporting Lifecycle?

The Reporting Lifecycle includes
- Report designing – The designing is done in Visual Studio Report Designer. It generates a class which embodies the Report Definition.

- Report processing – The processing includes binging the report definition with data from the report data source. It performs on all grouping, sorting and filtering calculations. The expressions are evaluated except the page header, footer and section items. Later it fires the Binding event and Bound event. As a result of the processing, it produces Report Instance. Report instance may be persisted and stored which can be rendered at a later point of time.

- Report Rendering: Report rendering starts by passing the Report Instance to a specific rendering extension (HTML or PDF formats). The instance of reports is paged if paging supported by output format. The expressions of items are evaluated in the page header and footer sections for every page. As a final step, the report is rendered to the specific output document.




4.Question : What are the ways to tune Reporting Services?
To tune-up the Reporting Services, follow the below mentioned ways:

- Expand the Server or utilizing the reporting services of another database server. For better embedding of report contents, report application’s logic and characteristics can have a duplicate copy of data.

- Replication of data continuously. Using nolock, the issues of locking can well be resolved and the performance of the query can be improved. This can be done by using dirty read at the time of duplicating the data is unavailable


5.How to upgrade report from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005?

You can use the following steps:
1. Back up ReportServer and ReportServerTemDB.
2. Back up encryption keys from Reporting services 2000 by using RsKeyMgmt.
3. Restore the databases backed up from step 1.
4. Connect to newly restored databases from step 3 from Reporting Services 2005 Configuration manager and database setup.
5. By using the provided credentials, Reporting Services will connect to new databases and perform the upgrade operations.
6. Confirm Reporting services upgrading the database and granting adequate rights to the credential account.
7. Restore backed up keys from step 2. Confirm that everything is displayed as green now.