Settings to
Configure Report Execution Caching from Report Manager
As we have learned, the
primary objective of Report Execution caching is to enhance report
performance by caching temporarily, upon the initial consumer-client
request, reports for which we enable such caching. We make the settings
to enable this capability, as well as specify its operational behavior, within
the report execution properties. Report execution properties control how a report is
processed. Execution properties must be set for each report individually,
although they can be set to reference pre-established defaults, as we shall
see.
As we saw in our hands-on
practice session in Report Execution
Caching I,
setting Report
execution properties within the SQL Server Management Studio is both
straightforward and intuitive. In the subsections that follow, we will
examine these settings for a sample report from the perspective of another
avenue, the Report Manager. We will do so, once again, using a report
from among the samples that are available to anyone installing Reporting
Services 2005.
If you have not installed
the samples, you’ll need to install them to use the sample report presented in
the steps below. If you prefer to use a local report, the steps will be
approximately the same for accessing the property settings.
Configure Report
Execution Caching from the Report Manager
Most of us are aware that, among the graphical user,
command-line and programmatic interfaces that Reporting Services makes
available to us for performing management activities, Report Manager is
perhaps the most user-friendly. This web-based management application
interfaces with the Report Server via the Web Service API, and is
easily accessed using a web browser. Report Manager has many uses, and
affords us a straightforward means of flexibly managing access to all reports
and related resources.
Let’s take a look at how we can adjust Report Execution
caching settings for a report within the Report Manager. To do this, we will take the following
steps:
1.
Open an
instance of the web browser on the PC.
2.
Point the
browser to the following URL:
http://<Server_Name>/Reports
NOTE: Replace <Server_Name>
in the above with the name of the server hosting Report Manager in the
local environment. Also, replace the default Reports directory with the
appropriate virtual directory established in the local environment, if
appropriate.
Report Manager’s home
page next
appears, somewhat similar to that shown in Illustration 2.
Illustration 2: Accessing
the Report Manager from the Web Browser
3.
Access the
sample reports (mine are within the AdventureWorks Sample Reports directory
shown in Illustration 2 above), by navigating into their containing
folder(s) from the home page.
4.
Click-select
the Sales Reason Comparisons report from among the sample reports
listed, as depicted in Illustration 3.
Illustration
3: Opening the Sample Sales Reason Comparisons Report ...
The report briefly
executes, and then opens.
5.
Click the Properties
tab atop the report, as shown in Illustration 4.
Illustration
4: Accessing Report Properties ...
6.
Click the Execution
tab that appears on the left side of the page, as depicted in Illustration 5.
Illustration
5: Accessing the Execution Settings for the Report ...
We arrive at the Execution
properties page, where we can set execution properties for the currently
selected report only. These options determine when report processing occurs,
and, among other activities, we can set these options to govern a report run
during off-peak hours, and the like, for flexible resource scheduling within
our own environments. As we have learned, one of the options that might be
useful to us might be to temporarily cache copies of a frequently
accessed report. The idea, of course, would be to eliminate wait time for multiple
users attempting to access the same report, say, within minutes of each other.
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