The installation experience for SQL Server Denali is very similar to SQL Server 2008 R2 but there are some important differences because of the new services.  I would also add that this is the install of the beta and I daresay I’ll need to do another post when it is released. The options for the database itself are largely unchanged, the biggest differences are for reporting and analysis services, because of the cool new things you can do now and in this post I want to look specifically at reporting services.

Reporting Services can still be installed natively, and I couldn’t see that this had changed at all even to the point that Report Builder 3 is supplied to design the reports.  If you have seen anything around Denali you may well have heard of project Crescent, but there are two other key things to know about this new version of reporting services in SharePoint mode:

• End users can setup alerts when numbers on reports go out of band.
• Reporting service is now a part of SharePoint, (it requires SharePoint 2010 sp1) and is configured through PowerShell. This has been done to remove the performance degradation in previous versions of reporting services when in integrated mode which although reduced in SQL Server 2008 R2 also mean you have to configure SharePoint and the reporting services service using it’s own configuration tool.

In order to setup Reporting Services in SharePoint:

• Check this dialog in the installation of SQL Server :

• Follow this guide to configure SharePoint for Reporting Service
• Having done that you can set up the alerting functionality using this link. Note this uses SQL Agent so make sure you have that running. 
• You’ll also want to setup e-mail in reporting services by defining your smtp server once the reporting service is setup.  This can be done from SharePoint administration..

Once this has been setup you can then run any report that has stored credentials (i.e. its not running against the user who’s running the report) and set up an alert..

and then complete this template to be alerted on any condition you can describe here..

If you want to try any of this, then SQL Server Denali ctp 3 is available for download here and there’s matching  sample databases , reports and tutorials for it on codeplex.