Let's Talk about .. SQL Server 2005 & 2008

Last Thursday, I participated the meeting of MS SQL Server 2008 Presentation by Mr.Nicolas and Mr.Jason , engineers from Microsoft.


Because my office member have started using Reporting Services in our systems, thus we would like to discuss about it and the problems we found.


The first one they suggested is "Scale Out". They recommended us to use many report servers to point to the report catalog.


The important one they suggested us to use was Report Catalog. The Report Catalog consists of Reporting Services Database (RSDB) and Reporting Services Tempolary Database (RSTempDB). It has a lot of I/O of transaction.


1.RSDB stores the report's metadata, including snapshots. It is long living, thus it should be backed up.
2.RSTempDB stores tempolary snapshot while running reports. It is highly volatile. And since its volatile, we need the report lifetime policy of data by setting session timeout value (10 min): Clean up Cycle Minutes guides background clean up thread.


Then, how different between RS2005 and RS2008.
For RS2005,

-Many insert to Chunk Data

-Many insert to Snapshot Data

-Many insert to Session Data Table

For RS2008,

-Many insert to Segment; take majority of transation of RSTempDB


Some trip to optimize the Report Performance

-Remove the unnecessary columns

-Bring rendered report to user, for example, doc, pdf, etc.


They showed us the new tool, MS SQL Server 2008 Report Builder. It looks like MS Office 2007 Application because of its theme. In the future, users can design and use the reports themselves. I asked them if there are any features that we still need Visual Studio 2008 to develop the report. They answered me that the Report Builder can do anything VS2008 can except debugging and creating and using several data sources.