Summary
This chapter gives you a brief tour of Reporting Services and enough detail to get you started toward a better understanding of the technology. Reporting Services runs on an IIS system and requires a SQL Server 2000 system to manage its databases. Visual Studio .NET plays a role as the host for the Report Designer add-in, and it can be used to build Data Sources, queries, and report definitions and to deploy them. The underlying Report Server and its Data Processing and Rendering extensions help capture report data from a variety of data sources and publish managed reports in a variety of formats. Next, we'll show you how to install Reporting Services.
Microsoft recommends that you avoid use of the underscore character in computer names as the Report Server does not persist the session state information on these systemsunless they have been patched with Internet Explorer Patch MS01-055. See "Preparing to Install" in the Reporting Services documentation for more information. [25]