Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team : SQL Server Reporting Services

Ultimate guide to upgrading to SQL Server 2008

denny.lee — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 03:57:00 GMT

For the ultimate guide to upgrading to SQL Server 2008, please refer to the SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide.

A successful upgrade to SQL Server 2008 should be smooth and trouble-free. To achieve that smooth transition, you must devote plan sufficiently for the upgrade, and match the complexity of your database application. Otherwise, you risk costly and stressful errors and upgrade problems. Like all IT projects, planning for every contingency and then testing your plan gives you confidence that you will succeed. But if you ignore the planning process, you increase the chances of running into difficulties that can derail and delay your upgrade. This document covers the essential phases and steps involved in upgrading existing SQL Server 2000 and 2005 instances to SQL Server 2008 by using best practices. These include preparation tasks, upgrade tasks, and post-upgrade tasks.

Chapter 1 gives an overview of the technical issues and decisions that are involved in an upgrade to SQL Server 2008, as well as recommendations for planning and deploying an upgrade.
Chapter 2 addresses issues related to upgrading to SQL Server 2008 Management Tools.
Chapters 3 through 8 focus on upgrade issues for SQL Server relational databases.
Chapter 9 addresses upgrading to SQL Server 2008 Express.
Chapters 10 through 14 focus on upgrading to SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence components: Analysis Services, Data Mining, Integration Services, and Reporting Services.
Chapter 15 addresses the implications of upgrading to SQL Server 2008 for other Microsoft applications and platforms.
Appendix 1 contains a table of allowed SQL Server 2008 version and edition upgrade paths.
Appendix 2 contains an upgrade planning checklist.

Reporting Services Scale-Out Deployment Best Practices

denny.lee — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 01:59:00 GMT

Check out the the third of five technical note as part of the Building and Deploying Large Scale SQL Server Reporting Services Environments Technical Note Series: Reporting Services Scale-Out Deployment Best Practices

This technical note reviews the

SSRS Scale-Out Architecture
Report Catalog sizing
The benefits of File System snapshots for SSRS 2005
Why File System snapshots may not help for SSRS 2008
Using Cache Execution
Load Balancing your Network
Isolate your workloads
Report Data Performance Considerations

Enjoy!

New Best Practices Articles Published - Scaling Up Reporting Services 2008 vs. Reporting Services 2005: Lessons Learned

carl.rabeler — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:45:00 GMT

Reporting Services 2008 was able to respond to 3–4 times the total number of users and their requests on the same hardware without HTTP 503 Service Is Unavailable errors compared with Reporting Services 2005, regardless of the type of renderer. In stark contrast, Reporting Services 2005 generated excessive HTTP 503 Service Is Unavailable errors as the number of users and their requests increased, regardless of the report renderer.

Our tests clearly show that the new memory management architecture of the report server enables Reporting Services 2008 to scale very well, particularly on the new four-processor, quad-core processors. With our test workload, Reporting Services 2008 consistently outperformed SQL Server 2005 with the PDF and XLS renderers on the four-processor, quad-core hardware platform (16 cores) both in terms of response time and in terms of total throughput. Furthermore, with these renderers on this hardware platform, Reporting Services dramatically outperformed other hardware platforms regardless of Reporting Services version, responding to 3–5 times the number of requests than when running on either of the other hardware platforms. As a result, we recommend that you scale up to four-processor, quad-core servers for performance and scale out to a two-node deployment for high availability. Thereafter, as demand for more capacity occurs, add more four-processor, quad-core servers.

Finally, with all renderers and with all hardware platforms using our test workload, the performance bottlenecks were the processor on the front-end server and the disk subsystem on the data source with Reporting Services 2008, whereas the Reporting Services front-end Web service was the performance bottleneck with Reporting Services 2005.

http://sqlcat.com/technicalnotes/archive/2008/07/09/scaling-up-reporting-services-2008-vs-reporting-services-2005-lessons-learned.aspx