4-Day (BI-RSDSN08-301-EN)

Description
Audience
Prerequisites
Course Objectives
Course Outline

Description

This course will introduce Enterprise Reporting with Reporting Services 2008, its characteristics and relation to real business projects. It will provide System Administrators with the knowledge necessary to understand and manage a SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services solution, and Report Designers with the skills necessary to design different kinds of usual reports. You will also learn how and when to use Ad-hoc reporting functionalities, a hot topic in the industry. Additional topics such as setup, configuration, and maintenance are covered according to attendees’ skills and interests.

Target Audience

This course is intended for future Reporting Services system administrators and future Reporting Services report designers.

Prerequisites

Before attending this course, it is recommended that students have the following skills:

• General knowledge of Microsoft Windows Platform (Authentication mechanisms, authorization principles, web technologies, SQL Server, Windows Server 200x…)
• General knowledge of SQL and RDBMS, OLAP, XML, and HTML
• General knowledge of programming techniques and/or scripting (some VB.NET knowledge is desirable)

Course Objectives

Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to:

• Manage a Reporting Services 2008 based enterprise reporting solution
• Design intermediate level reports from SQL and OLAP sources
• Plan for an ad-hoc reporting solution

Course Summary Outline

Module 01:  Introduction

This module introduces the product general aspects and includes a review of the end user experience with it. The rest of the course deals with how to develop the user experiences outlined here.

• Introducing Reporting Services
  • What is Reporting Services (SSRS)
  • Business Scenarios
  • Report Life Cycle
  • SSRS Architecture overview
  • RDL (Report Definition Language)
  • Designers
• End user experience
  • Report manager
  • Viewing, Scheduling, Printing & Exporting
  • MyReports

Module 02:  Designing Reports

This module includes all aspects related to designing reports, from basic to intermediate-advanced level.

• Data Sources
  • Defining Data Sources
    • Relational
    • OLAP
    • Semantic models
  • Types of data sources
  • Query assistants
  • Data Source Expressions
• Report Layout
  • Report bands
  • Controls
  • Understanding Data Regions
  • The Tablix control
  • Sorting and Interactive Sorting
  • Grouping
  • Summarizing
  • Graphics
  • Gauges
• Report-to-User interactivity
  • Parameters. Cascading parameters
  • Drill-down
  • Links (Subreports)
• Advanced features
  • Expressions & Functions
    • Report Collections
    • Functions
    • Variables
  • Conditional formatting
  • Embedded code

Module 03:  Semantic Models & Report Builder

This module introduces the ad-hoc reporting technology, includes a review of semantic model development and a review of report designing with models.

• Introduction
  • Ad-hoc Reporting
  • Infinite Drilldown
• Building Models
  • Relational Sources
  • OLAP Sources
• Building Reports with Report Builder
• Report Builder 2.0

Module 04:  Administering Reporting Services

This module includes all the concepts and abilities necessary to manage a Reporting Services based enterprise reporting solution.

• Administration Tools
• Object management
  • Folders
  • Data Sources and Credentials
  • Reports
  • Linked reports
• Tuning Report Processing
  • Cache
  • Snapshots
  • History
• Authentication and Authorization
  • System Level roles and permissions
  • Item Level roles and permissions
• Subscriptions
  • Standard subscriptions
  • Data driven Subscriptions

Module 05:  Setup, Configuration & Maintenance

This module reviews all concepts and tools necessary to setup, configure and maintain a typical Reporting Services solution. The module depth of coverage depends largely on attendee previous experience with Microsoft platform technologies.

• Architecture Review
  • Native mode
  • SharePoint Integrated mode
• Setting Up SSRS
  • Scenarios
  • HTTPs
  • Required accounts
• Configuring SSRS
  • Configuration Manager
  • Configuration files
  • Report Builder specific issues
• Maintenance
  • Encryption Key backup
  • SSRS Database backup
  • RS Scripting
  • Logging

Module 06:  Accessing Reporting Services

This short module is a review of alternative ways to access Reporting Services contents and of its extensibility options. These contents are fully developed in other Reporting Services courses.

• Accessing SSRS
  • Web Service APIs
  • URL Access
• Reporting Controls
• Extending SSRS