SQL 2008 R2 SSRS Dissappointment

Tomaz.tsql — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:45:00 GMT

SSRS in SQL 2008 R2 was a big dissappointment. I couldn't event though about it that Microsoft developers couldn't improve and upgrade two most important things:

- managing reports and

- managing access control.

If one has only 5 reports this concern is absolutelly out of the question. If one has 500 reports for 1000 users created in general for 30 and more countries than you have a huge problem. SSRS was not design to think big. I see SSRS as a "by the way" solution and service with many handy tools, extreme usability and couple of "bugs".

But this two bugs have been bugging me since 2000 release.

Managing reports was never easy. One can use ReportServer database (on SSRS native instance) where tables like dbo.Catalog and dbo.Policies, dbo.Rolesl, dbo.ExecutionLog come very hand, but just will not do the trick.

for example: If you face migration of report server (which is not so obsolete problem or task) there is no way one can by one click or with one query get for all report's data sources. DataSource is by default embedded into report and it is absolutely impossible to get it from the database nor from RDL file. on top of that. you sure can get all the users that have been using the reports, as well as all the rights that user has; meaning one can get a list of all the reports that user has access granted. Thank God. But imagine following. After tidiou task of migrating all the reports, now i have to click again and again through each of the report to see the rights for each user. I'd rather kill my self then do this. And what's even worse is, that adding new user to SSRS can only be done via Report Manager by clicking and writing user's AD name. Again, if I have 5 reports i would not even think of this. But managing 500 reports is not comprehesable.

For all three reasons stated above, i will not argue, there are couple of workarounds that i have found, but are relatively useless when one go on bigger scale. What's even worse is that average life span of a report is up to 6 months in our system.

Tomaz.tsql : access, problems

SQL 2008 R2 SSRS Dissappointment