SQL Reporting Services Troubleshooting Tips Greg Celentano SQL Saturday Providence

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About Me  SQL Server DBA  Also work with SharePoint & Salesforce

Agenda  SSRS Components  Common SSRS troubleshooting  What to look at when analyzing performance  Scaling up / Scaling out

Where to start Installation  Native & SharePoint options  This installs SSRS on the Instance you selected earlier  Multiple SSRS instances are legal

But wait…Before we install  Did you ask the right questions to the user  What is the application?  Who will be using this application?  What is the importance of this application?  What is the approximate size of the data?  Whatever else you feel is an important question about the application

Configuration Manager

RsReportServer.config  Create a backup first  Modify at your own risk  CREATE A BACKUP FIRST!!!!!!!!!!  MSDN Guide to RsReportServer.config 

Where Are Reports Created  Pre SQL 2012 – Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS)  After SQL 2012 – Data Tools

Data Sources SSRS can use  Microsoft SQL Server  Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services  Microsoft Azure SQL Database  SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse  Oracle  SAP NetWeaver BI  Hyperion Essbase  Microsoft SharePoint Lists  Teradata  OLE DB  ODBC  XML  Linked Servers*

Troubleshooting issues demo  Security issues  Folders and data sources  dataset can’t be found error  Integrated security and prompts for data sources  Review settings around a RDL  Discuss Scheduled tasks  and File drops  SSRS performance settings  Time out settings  Finding SSRS long running SPIDs and what they are doing  Examining the execution log

Ways to monitor and things to look for  Executionlog2 view within SSRS ReportingDB  Time Data Retrieval (ms) – Time to grab data from source  Time Processing (ms) – Time SSRS took to process that data  Time Rendering (ms) – Time SSRS took to display the report  Parameters  Don’t forget about the Additional Info column  Sp_who2 ‘active’ & DBCC INPUTBUFFER  Profiler or Extended Events  Third party tools  Watch for CreateChunkSegment and WriteLockSessions, indicators of SSRS resource pressure

Performance Options  What is next after tuning queries & stored procedures?  Are there more users needing access to reports  Look at the hardware SSRS is running on - Scale up  Look at the SSRS topology - Scale out

Scale up  Increase system resources  CPU  RAM  Maybe IO/Disk speed title="server hardware by Sivaserver, on Flickr

Scale out  Spread out the processing  Relocate ReportServices service  Relocate ReportServer & ReportServerTempDB

Moving the SSRS DBs

A simple example

Another Simple Example

Simple scale out pros & cons Pros  Relieve pressure and provide more resources to other applications  Dedicated reporting environment Cons  Network bandwidth  Licensing

Complex Scale Out Option

Complex Scale Out Pros & Cons Pros  Accommodate more users and report requests  Results should process faster for the user Cons  More complex topology  More services to monitor and troubleshoot  Licensing cost

Recap  What goes into an install and Configuration of SSRS  How reports are designed will have an impact on performance  Simple ways to find bottlenecks  Scale out options

Links  Technet guide on Scale-Out Deployment   More Information on SSRS Execution Log 