Technical Note Series on Reporting Services Performance and Scalability
Over the past few months, I contributed to a series of technical notes by my esteemed colleagues Denny and Lukasz on https://sqlcat.com/. The technical notes provide guidance on how to build, deploy, and optimize large scale SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) environments. We derived some of the best practices from internal as well as external enterprise SSRS deployments.
So far, a webcast and three technical notes are available; we are working on (at least) one more. The notes apply to both SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 and 2008, unless a particular section calls out one of the releases explicitly.
- New: TechNet Webcast
Webcast summarizing the material of all four technical notes below.
- Reporting Services Scale-Out Architecture
The focus of the technical note is an overview of the Reporting Services scale-out architecture, referenced throughout the technical note series.
- Report Catalog Best Practices
Provides guidance and best practices on the report server catalog databases; i.e. the underlying databases that provide metadata (parameters, snapshots, history, etc.) used by Reporting Services to provide your reports.
- Scale-Out Deployment Best Practices
Provides guidance and best practices on deployment details for scaling out your Reporting Services environment including configurations and the use of File System snapshots.
- New: Reporting Services Performance Optimizations
This fourth technical note focuses on general considerations for optimizing your entire system.
In addition, I put together a blog post about the ExecutionLog2 view which provides insights into analyzing and optimizing reports. This is related to what I covered in my very well received CT-27 chalk talk at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference recently on "Report Design Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices for Performance and Scalability". I might put together additional postings to cover more of that information - check my postings marked with the "Performance" and/or "Scalability" tags frequently.
Related to these topics, I'd also like to point to one of my initial postings about scale up improvements in Reporting Services 2008.