Report Execution Caching II: Report Manager Perspective - Page 3

September 28, 2007

Our intent is to configure the report to run “on demand,” from the cache, as we shall see with our next settings, where we schedule the expiration of the cached report, using each of two possible options.

To make the cached copy expire after a particular time period:

Our settings on the Execution page for a half-hour expiration of the cached report appear as shown in Illustration 6.

To make the cached copy expire on a schedule:

The Create Custom Schedule page appears.

The Create Custom Schedule page appears, with our settings, as depicted in Illustration 7.

The settings above dictate a custom schedule for expiration of the cache of this specific report. Using such a fixed schedule is ideal in many scenarios, where we want to mandate Report Server processing at a specific time. An example might be setting the execution cache to expire at 2:00 AM every Monday morning, in a situation where, say, we update sales data and refresh our cubes by midnight each Sunday for reporting the following week. This means, of course, that the newly updated sales data is reflected when information consumers begin requesting reports after the opening of business on Monday morning.

We are returned to the Execution page, where a summary of our new settings appears as shown in Illustration 8.

Finally, an additional setting, Report Execution Timeout, lies at the bottom of the Execution page. Here we can set a limit on the amount of time allowed for report processing – one of several “governor” properties we can set surrounding our reports to prevent “runaway conditions,” as well as perhaps to minimize the risk of overtaxing system resources in other ways. Our options for timeout default settings include:

• Use the system default setting - directs the Report Server to use the default report execution timeout value as it is globally defined for the Report Server (which, as we learned in Report Execution Caching I, we specify within the Report Server properties, on the Server Properties dialog, Execution page, as depicted in Illustration 9).

• Do not timeout report execution - directs the Report Server to impose no limitations on report execution time.
• Limit report execution to the following number of seconds - timeout value is defined as a specific number of seconds (with the defaulted selector value the same as the global default setting that is defined in the corresponding Server Properties setting, as noted in the Use the default setting option above).

Conclusion

In this article, we continued a three-part subseries surrounding caching options in Reporting Services 2005. We began by briefly reviewing the three types of caching that Reporting Services 2005 offers. We then resumed our examination of the second of these three, Report Execution caching.

As a part of our examination of Report Execution caching, we reviewed the general purpose of this second caching type. We next reviewed details about how Report Execution caching is accomplished in Reporting Services 2005. Finally we explored the settings involved in putting Report Session caching to work, within the Report Manager interface (having addressed similar settings from a SQL Server Management Studio perspective in the first half of this article, Report Execution Caching I), including system defaults for those settings. Throughout the various sections of the article, we discussed other information about Report Execution caching in an attempt to assist in selecting or discarding this option for use within our own business environments.

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