Flexible reporting capabilities are a requirement for most business applications and their integration into Web apps makes them more versatile than ever. With the recent release of SQL Server™ 2000 Reporting Services, you can easily add reporting from diverse data sources. In this article I will introduce report authoring using Visual Studio® and Reporting Services and demonstrate how to integrate reports into your Web applications.
Reporting Services is a server-based reporting platform that is built on the .NET Framework and integrated with SQL Server 2000, so you can integrate rich reporting features into your apps using an extensive Web services-based API. Although the report server uses SQL Server as the repository for reports, any data source with an OLE DB, ODBC, or ADO.NET provider can be used to supply data to the reports, making Reporting Services a great choice for reporting in diverse enterprise environments.