SQL Server Reporting Services makes reporting faster and easier than ever. This hands-on guide will show you how to harness the full power of Reporting Services to create reporting and business intelligence solutions that meet your company's needs. It walks you step-by-step through the fundamentals of designing the most effective reports by following careful planning considerations.

The authors progress from beginning to advanced report design and filtering techniques, showing you the conditions where reports could be more efficient. They also explore holistic business intelligence solutions, comprehensive OLAP/Analysis Services reporting, and complete production-deployment scenarios.

You'll learn how to write custom expressions and program functions to meet specific reporting needs. This will help you design, build, and deploy reports with capabilities far greater than any other reporting tools you may have used in the past. The techniques covered in the book will also enable you to take reporting further than you have before and provide your users with real business intelligence.

What you will learn from this book

• Using reports to visualize important business-decision metrics

• Building the presentation layer for an enterprise business intelligence solution

• Reporting from OLAP cubes and relational database systems

• Enabling information workers to easily create their own self-service reports

• Real-world report design patterns and recipes

• Designing and deploying reports for enterprise portals and dashboards, including SharePoint technologies

• Advanced object-oriented programming techniques for extending and adding functionality to Reporting Services

Who this book is for
This book is for report designers, developers, administrators, and business professionals interested in learning the advanced functionality, reporting, server administration, and security issues of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

About the Author

Paul Turley (Vancouver, WA) is a Manager of Specialized Services for Hitachi Consulting Education Services. Paul manages the Business Intelligence training team and teaches classes for companies throughout the world on Microsoft SQL Server technologies. He works with companies to design architecture for and build BI and reporting solutions. He has been developing business database solutions since 1991 for companies like Microsoft, Disney, Nike, and Hewlett - Packard. He has been a Microsoft Certified Trainer since 1996 and holds several industry certifications, including MCTS and MCITP for BI, MCSD, MCDBA, MSF Practitioner, and IT Project+.
Paul has authored and coauthored several books and courses on database, business intelligence, and application development technologies. He is the lead courseware developer for the Hitachi Consulting courses: “ SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence Solutions ” and “ SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Solutions. ” His books include Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services , Professional SQL Server Reporting Services (SQL Server 2000) , Beginning Transact - SQL with SQL Server 2000 and 2005 , Beginning SQL Server 2005 Administration , Beginning Access 2002 VBA , Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services , and Professional Access 2000 Programming — all from Wrox. He is also a contributing author to SQL Server 2005 Integration Services Step by Step from Microsoft Press.

Thiago Silva (Dallas, TX) is a Manager of Specialized Services for Hitachi Consulting. Thiago has also been designing and developing custom .NET, business intelligence, and Reporting Services solutions since the early days of .NET and SQL Server 2000. He is a part of the Microsoft Strategic Alliance leadership group within Hitachi Consulting, where he helps create, manage, and deliver internal training materials and intellectual capital around the Microsoft technology stack. He also teaches the SQL Server Reporting Services course offered by Hitachi Consulting.
Thiago has been a featured guest on the talk show podcast .NET Rocks and is an active member of the .NET development community, frequently writing on his blog Silvaware, at http://silvaware.blogspot.com. Thiago holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Management Information Systems from Texas A & M University, and a MCAD.NET technical certification.

Bryan C. Smith (Irving, TX) is a Manager of Specialized Services for Hitachi Consulting. Bryan has been developing and administering database solutions since 1997 for clients in a variety of industries. These days, he focuses on helping clients build Business Intelligence solutions using the Microsoft SQL Server product suite. Bryan holds MCITP, MCTS, MCDBA, A+, Network+, and Server+ certifications, and serves as an instructor for Hitachi Consulting ’ s SQL Server Analysis Services course.

Ken Withee (Seattle, WA) is a Senior Consultant with Hitachi Consulting. He earned a Master of Science degree in Computer Science studying under Dr. Edward Lank at San Francisco State University. Their work has been published in the LNCS journals and was the focus of a presentation at the IASTED conference in Phoenix. Their work has also been presented at various other Human Computer Interaction conferences throughout the world.
Ken has more than 7 years of professional computer and management experience working with a vast range of technologies.
Ken is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist and is certified with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SQL Server 2005, and has passed the certification exam for .NET 2.0.