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Recommendations for Uninstalling & Installing Reporting Services

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I am sure it has happen to all of us in some situations that we decided to uninstall Reporting Services and install it again. Sometimes we make this decision because the state of Reporting Services is very unstable that it would take too long to troubleshoot the errors or because we want to restore RS to its original state.

From my experience on installing and uninstalling Reporting Services, I recommend to follow the steps bellow:

Note: Before uninstalling Reporting Services, if you wish to preserve the reports already created, you should backup the ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB databases and the encryption keys to be restored later in the new installation.

1. Uninstall Reporting Services from “Add & Remove Programs” or “Programs & Features” (in Windows Server 2008 or Vista)

2. Manually remove/backup the databases ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB from the SQL Server. If we already had some reports deployed to Reporting Services, we would do a backup of the databases and reconnect after the new installation. If we want to set a clean Reporting Services without reports, we can just remove them using Management Studio.

3. Manually remove the virtual folders Reports and ReportServer from IIS (This is only for RS 2005. As you may know, RS 2008 doesn’t use IIS)

4. Manually remove the folder of the instance of Reporting Services (For example for RS 2008 would be something like C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10.MSSQLSERVER). This folder is not removed automatically and, if we don’t remove it manually, the configuration files will contain information about the old configuration and we might conserve old problem if they existed.

5. Install Reporting Services with an administrator user

6. Install latest Service Pack

7. Configure Reporting Services using the Reporting Services Configuration Manager.

 

I hope this eliminates your fears about uninstall and install Reporting Services

Maria Esteban

Reporting Services Support Engineer

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2009
    Thanks for the tips! now I have the guts to explore my vista and have the confidence that I am doing it right. Cannot wait to hear more tips from you soon related to these matters.

  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2010
    After an upgrade to SQL2008 left me with a SQL2005 version of SSRS, i was thoroughly confused as to how to "fix": do I upgrade and if so, how do i do it -- and found so much in-depth, confusing material (I lack a good, technical grasp of all the interlocking technologies that support SQL). And then I thought -- after finding this blog -- well, what is my investment in SSRS anyway. So i followed your steps and now have a well-installed SSRS2008. And all my prior SSRS2005 .RDLs appear to open fine. Thanks very much, Maria.