SQL Server Reporting Services interview questions
SQL Server Reporting Services - posted on August 27, 2008 at 17:10 pm
by Amit Satpute
What Can SQL Server Reporting Services Do?
With Reporting Services,
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You can create interactive, tabular, graphical, or free-form reports from
relational, multidimensional, or XML-based data sources.
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You can publish reports, schedule report processing, or access reports
on-demand.
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You can create ad hoc reports based on predefined models and interactively
explore data within the model.
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You can select from a variety of viewing formats, export reports to other
applications, and subscribe to published reports.
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You can view the reports created over a Web-based connection or as part of
Windows application.
Explain the architecture of reporting services.
Reporting Services runs as a middle-tier server as part of the existing server
architecture.
SQL Server 2000 should be installed for the database server, and Internet
Information Services 6.0 as a Web server.
The report server engine takes in report definitions, locates the corresponding
data, and produces the reports.
Interaction with the engine can be done through the Web-based Report Manager,
which also lets you manage refresh schedules and notifications.
End users view the report in a Web browser, and can export it to PDF, XML, or
Excel.
Explain Reporting Lifecycle.
The phases of the Reporting Life Cycle involve:
Report authoring
This stage involves creation of reports that are published using the
Report Definition language. RDL is an XML based industry standard for defining
reports.
Report management
This involves managing the published reports as a part of the
webservice. The reports are chched for consistency and performance. They can be
executed whenever demanded or can be scheduled and executed.
In short Report Management includes:
- Organizing reports and data sources,
- Scheduling report execution and delivery, and
- Tracking reporting history.
Report delivery
Reports can be delivered to the consumers either on their demand or
based on an event. Then they can view them is a web-based format.
Report security
It is important to protect reports as well as the report resources.
Therefore, Reporting Services implement a flexible, role-based security model.
What are the ways to tune Reporting Services?
Following are a few ways you can tune up Reporting Services:
You can expand your current Server or avail the reporting service database on
another server. Depending on report characteristics and application logic, it
is sometimes better to have a copy of data separate to improve the performance.
You can also use continuous replication for reporting. With this there wouldn’t
be any interference with the OLTP environment.
The locking problems can be solved by using ‘nolock’ and the query performance
can be improved using ‘dirty read’ when a copy of the data is not available.
This can be accomplished only if the database design and application logic
permit dirty reads.
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