Microsoft® SQL Server® Reporting Services Recipes: for Designing Expert Reports

Part V. Integrated Reporting Applications

• Creating a Report Server Usage Report

• Rotating Report Dashboard

• Updating Data From a Report

• Offline Reporting Using the Report Viewer Control

CREATING A REPORT SERVER USAGE REPORT

Over time, the number of reports in a business environment grows. This is an inevitable fact in most any medium or large organization. In the new age of self-service and user-driven reporting solutions, reports will spring up from multiple sources and, of course, the corporate IT group is charged with managing them all. In this common environment of data sprawl, most reports are duplicates of or similar to copies of others with only minor variations of sorting, grouping, and filtering features.

For IT to consolidate and optimize many reports in a business reporting platform, it must know what users are using reports and how often. It's critical to know how long different reports take to run and when the peak and lull times occur throughout the day for scheduling subscriptions and maintenance tasks.

A server usage report is an indispensible tool for wrangling out-of-control reports. With it, IT leaders can easily answer questions like:

• What reports are being run most often?

• Who is running certain reports and when?

• What reports have excessively long running queries?

• What reports don't ever get run?

• What similar reports may be candidates for consolidation?

Product Versions

• Reporting Services 2000

• Reporting Services 2005

• Reporting Services 2008

What You'll Need

• Connection to the ReportServer ...