Using "Scale-Out" deployments In SQL Server Reporting Services 2005

Today I really played around with scale out deployments in 2005 (known as "reporting farms" in earlier versions) for the first time since I worked with them in 2000, and found an interesting behavior:

I wanted to point my 2005 Enterprise Edition at a reportserver database sitting on 2005 Developer Edition. I figured this would work, because books online says:

Requirements for a scale-out deployment include the following:

  • The Reporting Services edition must be Enterprise, Developer, or Evaluation. Standard edition does not support a scale-out deployment.

Well, it's not quite that simple. It turns out that while Enterprise and Developer can be part of the same Scale-out deployment, you can only join a Developer Edition web service TO an Enterprise reportserver database. If you try and do what I did, you 'll get this error message:

The feature: "Using other editions of SQL Server for report data sources and/or the report server database" is not supported in this edition of Reporting Services

Many Thanks to Brad Syputa for helping me out with this!

...and many thanks to Heidi Steen who just sent me some additional information which will be in a future update of books online!

For this edition of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

Use this edition of the Database Engine instance to host the database

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services (local only).

Workgroup Edition

Workgroup Edition (local only)

Evaluation Edition

Standard, Evaluation, Enterprise Editions (local or remote)

Developer Edition

Standard, Developer, Enterprise Editions (local or remote)

Standard Edition

Standard, Enterprise Editions (local or remote)

Enterprise Edition

Standard, Enterprise Editions (local or remote)