About the Series …
This
article is a member of the series MSSQL Server Reporting Services.
The series is designed to introduce MSSQL Server Reporting Services ("Reporting
Services"), with the objective of presenting an overview of its features,
together with many tips and techniques for real-world use. For more
information on the series, as well as the hardware / software requirements
to prepare for the exercises we will undertake, please see my initial Database Journal article, A New Paradigm for Enterprise Reporting.
Basic
assumptions underlying the series are that you have correctly installed
Reporting Services, including Service Pack 1, along with the applications
upon which it relies, and that you have access and the other rights /
privileges required to complete the steps we undertake in my articles. For
details on the specifics of the adjustments necessary to quickly allow full
freedom to complete the exercises in this and subsequent articles, as well as
important assumptions regarding rights and privileges in general, please see
earlier articles in the series, as well as the Reporting Services Books
Online.
This
article also relies upon sample files that may not have been automatically installed,
configured, and / or deployed within your Reporting Services installation. If
the samples have not been installed in, or were removed from, your environment,
the samples can be found on the Reporting Services installation CD. We will
discuss accessing these files within the steps of our practice session.
About the BlackBelt Articles …
As we
have stated in earlier BlackBelt articles, one of the greatest
challenges in writing tutorial / procedural articles is creating each article
to be a freestanding document that is complete unto itself. This is important,
because it means that readers can complete the lesson without reference to
previous articles or access to objects created elsewhere. When our objective
is the coverage of a specific technique surrounding one or more components of a
report, a given administrative function surrounding all reports, and other
scenarios where the focus of the session is not the creation of reports,
per se, achieving our goals can be challenging because a report or reports often
has to be in place before we can begin to cover the material with which the
article concerns itself.
The BlackBelt
articles represent an attempt to minimize the setup required in simply getting
to a point within an article where we can actually perform hands-on practice
with the component(s) under consideration. We will attempt to use existing
report samples or other "prefabricated" objects that either come
along as part of the installation of the applications involved, or that are
readily accessible to virtually any organization that has installed the
application. While we will often have to make modifications to the sample(s)
involved (we will typically create a copy, to allow the original sample to
remain intact), to refine it to provide the backdrop we need to proceed with
the object or procedure upon which we wish to concentrate, we will still save a
great deal of time and distraction in getting to our objective. In some cases,
we will have to start from scratch with preparation, but my intention with the BlackBelt
articles will be to avoid this, if at all possible.
For
more information about the BlackBelt articles, see the section
entitled "About the BlackBelt Articles" in BlackBelt
Components: Manage Nulls in OLAP Reports.
Overview
In
working with many reporting tools over my career, particularly within
enterprise business intelligence suites and high-end production reporting
systems, I have become acquainted with various control features in each that
allow administrators to govern the actions of end users. Reporting
Services is no different in this aspect of need for control, and the
application provides numerous avenues for restraining our users from kicking
off resource crippling queries that, unchecked, could disrupt even the most
robust systems, as well as to prevent other harmful activities. At various
junctures within this series, we will examine ways to effect such controls on
an intermittent basis.
A
typical example of such control might be the need to limit report processing
time. In Reporting Services, we are provided a means of accomplishing this
with the Report Execution Timeout setting. In addition to the setting
itself, which is straightforward enough, we need to consider another, more
global setting as well, so as to ensure that the two interact properly to
produce the results we desire. Our focus in this article will be an examination of these
settings and how they work together to afford us a means of providing an
important control over resource utilization within Reporting
Services.
In this
session, we will:
-
Discuss how
the Report Execution Timeout setting provides us one means of control
over report processing demands; -
Prepare for
our practice session by creating a clone of one of the sample reports that
accompany Reporting Services, along with the respective data source file; -
Publish the
clone report for use in our practice from the Report Manager; -
Examine and
discuss the default settings for the Report Execution Timeout; -
Discuss
important considerations in the use of the Report Execution Timeout from
the perspective of the "sweep cycle" default within Reporting
Services, which evaluates the Report Execution Timeout for enforcement
of our settings; -
Perform an
exercise whereby we gain practice in setting both parameters for effective use
of the Report Execution Timeout.
