C H A P T E R 10
Managing Reports
In many reporting solutions prior to SSRS, report management required little more than delivering the
completed report file to the end user via a file share or embedded in a third-party application. SSRS is a
full reporting environment with features such as scheduled report execution, report subscription
services, snapshots, content caching, and on-demand Web access.
With these added benefits comes an additional level of management responsibility. Depending on
the size of the organization, some management tasks can be delegated to other users, such as
departmental managers, who might maintain report folders for their departments, as well as to system
administrators and DBAs. Fortunately, SSRS provides several means of managing the report server at all
levels. In this chapter, you’ll continue to work with built-in tools such as Report Manager and command-
line utilities, as well as with custom .NET management tools that take advantage of the SSRS
programming models to administer an SSRS deployment. We’ll also demonstrate SSRS’s Reporting
Services Configuration Manager. When connecting to an SSRS instance, it supplies much, if not all, of
the functionality that is available in the Site Settings section of Report Manager and the command-line
utilities. Using SSRS 2000 and 2005 once allowed some administrative tasks, like configuring report
subscriptions, to be done with SSMS. However, since the 2008 release, this functionality was removed
and is now only available using the Report Manager. Therefore, we have chosen to use Report Manager
for most of the examples in this chapter. Report Manager can be accessed from a Web browser and does
not require a local install of the SQL client tools.
Exploring Management Roles in SSRS Deployment
You can subdivide the management roles for an SSRS deployment into three basic categories:
- Content management
- Performance
- Report execution
It is always best practice to perform a test deployment of any application or service before placing it
into a production environment. Because our company provides services via the Internet to a wide range
of users, special management considerations—such as how to provide report subscriptions to the same
report for different companies—were imperative, and we needed to test various scenarios to ensure
proper functionality in each case. Let’s begin by looking at the three management categories and how
we implemented and tested them to ensure that when we deployed them to production, we would have
few (if any) unexpected consequences. We will show how to perform all these tasks using the built-in
administration tools with SSRS and SQL Server 2012. Later in the chapter, we’ll show how to build a
management application interface with .NET that provides the ability to schedule reports.