SRS - The latest crush

An year ago, I had a short stint with the reporting services. It wasnt much to explore in detail at that time, just to get it working for a project.
Working on one of the projects now, I had a chance to explore it again. Right from the first look, it has amused me as a reporting tool with fully loaded functionality.
In a nutshell, the SQL Reporting Services or SRS as it is more commonly known, allows you to connect to variety of data sources for fetching the data while producing commmon output formats like HTML, Excel, XML, CSV and lot others.
Coupled with it comes the security layer that deals with the authentication and authorization for the reports.This is where the users and their associated reports can be configured.
Developers can author the reports using the Report Definition Language (RDL) that is based on the XML format.The report manager interface allows direct uploading of RDL files to deploy the reports. Its that simple !
Report Management deals with the defining folders and resources, caching, data sources and several other things.The delivery mechanism for SRS allows delivery of reports using the on-demand (pull) model or the much loved event-based (pull) model, thereby offering flexibility of viewing the reports over the web or in email.

This post is concerned with a basic introduction to the SQL Reporting Service.More to follow with the problems that we overcame during the development phase !

Till then,
Happy Reporting !