SQL Server 2008 product included one of the services called as "SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 (SSRS)". SSRS is a full-featured application that provides report design, development, testing, and deployment of reports by the use of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) developer tool for all its operations.
SSRS block diagram as shown below has been taken from an online book for reference purposes:
Reporting Services include an HTTP listener that monitors incoming requests directed to HTTP.SYS on a specific port on the local computer. The host name and port are specified on a URL reservation when you configure the server.
Report Manager is an ASP.NET application that provides a browser-based interface for managing Reporting Services.
Reporting Services include an Authentication Layer that verifies the identity of the user or application that makes the request. The following authentication types are supported: Windows integrated security, NTLM authentication, Basic authentication, Forms or custom authentication, and Anonymous access. Reporting Services uses Windows integrated security and NTLM authentication by default.
The Web Service is also implemented as an ASP.NET application; it provides a programmatic interface to Reporting Services.
By default, reporting services creates and uses two SQL Server 2008 databases instances named ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB. The ReportServerTempDB database is used for temporary storage.
