In Short
I am thoroughly confused by the array of SQL Server services available, and am having a hard time finding a brief primer.
The Scoop
I am a long time ASP.Net developer who has happily been churning out ASP.Net applications for years. These have usually been based on SQL server and a range of custom tables and views.
Just recently I have had the need to do some reporting that goes a little beyond the straight forward, and so I have started to look into SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). In doing so I feel like i have opened up Pandora’s Box.
There is reporting services, integration services, Analysis services, Business intelligence, etc etc. This has got me wondering what they all do, and if I could (or should have been) leveraging these tools to do some of the heavy lifting for .net applications.
My immediate research efforts on Microsoft have stifled me with impenetrable marketing and business speak. My Google searched have turned up no comprehensive overview of what these tools are, or they fit together, or even which tool should be used when. One of the biggest problems i am having comprehending the options is that they all seem kind of the same to me!
So, all of this to say, if some kind sole could set me straight and point me in the right direction, I would be very grateful 🙂
Very high level overview:
Core services for the database engine itself consist of the SQL Server service itself (or MSSQLSERVER) and there’s also the SQL Server Agent and the SQL Server Browser. The SQL Server Agent is a job scheduler for SQL Server and handles some other maintenance tasks and so on, while the Browser service helps with accepting logins and so on by creating an easier way for client applications to connect to SQL Server.
All three of these services though are true ‘services’ in the sense that they’re daemons running on your server. But of these three, you ONLY need MSSQLSERVER running to be able to work with the relational database engine. (The other two services are optional.)
Then, in addition to core database engine functionality, there are a bunch of add-ons or supplemental ‘products’ and tools that Microsoft Offers to help make SQL Server that much better and more compelling as a platform/offering. As you’ve seen, these are typically marketed as ‘services’.
Reporting Services (or SSRS) is a great solution that uses a native SQL Server database to store information about data sources, report delivery schedules, access permissions, and so on… for a powerful reporting engine that makes it very easy to output great reports from pretty much ANY data source. You just define sources for the reports, wire up datasets and parameters, then use a specialized xml markup (Report Definition Language or RDL) to define look, feel, shape, and so on of your reports. And, Microsoft has created a ‘tweaked’ version of Visual Studio to make creating/developing/editing these reports much easier. That version of visual studio is called SQL Server Business Intelligence Design Studio (or BIDS).
Likewise, Microsoft also uses BIDS to help developers, DBAs, and analysts create data cubes – multidimensionally ‘joined’ tables using a specialized schema that allows SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to churn through pretty much any combination of data relations in order to provide ‘analytical data’. So… say you have a company selling widgets: you could define relationships between products, customers, sales regions, dates, and so on – and SSAS will take that data (along with specially defined ‘cube’ definitions that define those relationships, their granularity, and so on) and pre-calculate the outcome to pretty much any combination of those ‘dimensions’ or angles of data – so that you could say something like: “Show me all x-brand widgets sold by sales people in the northwest region in January of this year..” and it would give you a sum of those parts sold… and even let you drill-down by sales person, store, and so on – assuming you’ve defined your cube/relationships as needed.
Of course, this functionality is pretty powerful, but you almost never want these cubes running against your production tables… so companies typically create data warehouses or data marts to store their analytic data in. But to copy data on a regular basis from production into these warehouses/marts.. you need some kind of tool that makes it easy to figure out which changes should be picked up, how they should be handled, and what kinds of tweaks/changes you need to make to them to get them out of a highly-normalized production environment into a highly DEnormalized warehouse/data mart (where you’re using snowflake or star schemas)…
And this tool/service is none other than SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) – which has a rich set of connectors, pumps, transforms, monitors, and so on to facilitate data transformations and migrations on a scheduled basis. What’s very cool about this tool/service though… is that it doesn’t just connect/transform data between SQL Server and SQL Server… but it’s able to connect MOST data sources to MOST data sources – so it’s a powerful tool for transforming, exporting, importing, modifying, tweaking, and so on all of your data.
And… to define the ‘workflows’ for your integration/transformation projects, you also use Business Intelligence Design Studio – same as with defining cubes and so on for SQL Server Analysis Services.
Ultimately though, what makes all of these so cool is that you get access to:
SQL Server
SQL Server Reporting Services
SQL Server Integration Services
SQL Server Analysis Services
With SQL Server Standard and Enterprise Editions – so there’s no need to buy extra tools/solutions/offerings in order to be able to take advantage of these great features. (The Enterprise Edition of SQL Server which costs about 5x as much as Standard… comes with much better/cooler features in some ways … but you still get a solid subset of all features using the Standard Edition.)