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SQL Server 2008: Reporting Services no longer needs IIS?

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Title says it all, but is this really a feature you can benefit from or is it some piece of random engineering that the dev team decided to do because it would be "fun"?

One of the big challenges with SSRS has always been config, in fact I would argue its a problem for all of SQL Server 2005 so much so that we added a completely new tool to help manage it (technically it was 2, SQL Config Manager and Surface Area Config but SQl-CM really replaced 3 smaller utils that had been around for years). In general SQL 2008 is moving to a cleaner config model (and the separation of setup into copy and config).

Config simplification is one of the reasons for the move to not use IIS, but the other is around memory, thread and scale management, if you have every tried to generate a 100 page PDF report you will know what I mean.

Brian has a great article describing the reasons behind the change in detail, my investigation on a 40 page report with CTP-5 shows a decent improvement in rendering time, but with a greatly reduced memory load during rendering. While in VSTS we don't tend to generate a lot of multi-page reports we do have a  lot of concurrent users and the reports can be pretty memory intensive.

Looking forward to the RTM bits.

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  • data store
  • report renderer
  • report delivery mechanism (email, ftp, web, printer queue, etc).
  • report administration system   -- security   -- report scheduling   -- report notification (success, failure, running, etc)   -- user console to see reports the user owns, their next scheduled time, the status of running reports and the status of earlier completed runs of the report Thank you.  Our DBA group will be happy to put SQL server on machine A, reporting services on Machine B and not have IIS on either (for performance and security).

  • Anonymous
    December 13, 2007
    This is great.  In my lab, not having a lot of hardware or even hardware that can be used for a virtualization base, setting up Reporting Services on an instance of IIS used by other functions is just great. Now, if the next SQL 2005 service pack had this functionality...

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2008
    This is great what so ever u r doing abt sql 2008..but rem that if u increment the much more feture in it should be launched in niit as soon as we can study...........it will be good for our future.....