SQL Server Reporting Services is a comprehensive, server-based reporting solution that can author, manage, and deliver both paper-oriented and interactive, Web-based reports. Do you agree with all these rules? Are we missing some? Let us know what you think.
🔊 Historical (2006) Listen to Adam's podcast on these rules with Greg Low (42 min)
⚠️ While SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is still in use, it is considered legacy technology. For modern data reporting and analytics, Power BI is the recommended solution. Check out our Rules to better Power BI.
If you need consulting help, visit Enterprise Reporting and BI and book in a consultant.
By default SSRS will track reporting execution for the last 60 days. This might be OK in most cases, but you may want to adjust the retention days if you want better report usage statistics.
SSRS keeps track of each report that gets executed and records useful information like:
So it's quite simply a matter of querying the ReportServer database for information in the ExecutionLog table.
The five user experiences of Reporting Services are:
Like any solution, Reporting Services has its pros and cons. From our experience, we have discovered these things about Reporting Services:
Let's say you want to migrate SSRS reports from an old reporting service server (e.g. SQL Server 2008 R2) to a new one (e.g. SQL Server 2016). What involves?
There are 3 steps:
When working with SSRS reports, you need to have the right type of project otherwise it will be difficult for a developer, to create new reports or update existing ones.
If you have some reports and want to check them into source control, if you add them to project that is not a report project, your reports will not open in the design/preview view (allowing to see the DataSource and DataSets). They will open in the XML view (which is not pretty to work with).
The default configuration for Report Server isn't accessible by most mobile browsers and some desktop browsers too. You can adjust the authentication types allowed to increase the range.
Here are the steps to subscribe a report:
To ensure your Reporting Services is running in a healthy state, you need to check if you have all the green ticks in your "Report Server Configuration Manager".
SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services comes with some great samples that will help get you started. Unfortunately, they aren't installed by default.