17.2. Report Server

As the name suggests; the Report Server "serves" reports to users. The manageability of the Report Server is provided through a web interface as well as through SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio). Some of the management tasks on Report Server include credentials definition which is needed by Report Server to retrieve data from the data source, to provide appropriate access to the reports for end users and to define report execution schedule. You can cache the results of a report on Report Server, which really comes in handy when the report takes a long time to run (a batch SQL query is used to do this).