Full - Text searching and reporting services

Now that you’re an expert on all of the moving parts found in SQL Server’s reporting architecture, it’s time to start putting them to work for you. To begin, I call out those important but somewhat tedious tasks that you need to take care of before you can get to the fun stuff: 1. Make sure that your computer has the complete reporting support infrastructure. This runs the gamut from enough processor horsepower, memory, and bandwidth to software components. For example, if you grant remote users access to report content via a browser, you need to ensure that your computer has a working Web server. 2. Make sure you download and install all the correct database components. Simply downloading SQL Server 2005 Express with Advanced Services isn’t enough; you also should obtain a copy of SQL Express Toolkit, available for free from Microsoft. Found among its technologies are SQL Server Management Studio Express as well as SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio, which contains the Report Designer. You can get the toolkit from the Microsoft Web site. 3. Configure your report server. You need to perform or verify a number of administrative tasks before you’re ready to start building reports. You can address all these from Reporting Services Configuration Manager. For example, to successfully publish reports, you must set up at least one virtual directory on the server. As you can see in Figure 18-6, I created a virtual directory to serve as a destination for my reports. 4. Make sure your database is created and populated. For the example reports that I show you, the following two tables are all that’s needed: CREATE TABLE Clients ( ClientID INT PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL, CompanyName VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, RegionCode CHAR(1) NOT NULL ) CREATE TABLE Transactions ( TransactionID INT PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL, ClientID INT NOT NULL REFERENCES Clients, TransactionDate DATETIME NOT NULL, TransactionAmount DECIMAL(5,2) NOT NULL