The SQLCAT team just released a very interesting technical note which compares the relative “scalability goodness” of Reporting Services 2005 to 2008. You can read the article just as well as I can, but here’s the executive summary, and the results are pretty impressive (bold is mine, btw)
Executive Summary
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.
It’s a whole new ballgame, folks!
May 8th, 2009 at 1:44 am
hi there,
I am interested to share some information about my experience in setting up SSRS 2005 and SSRS 2008. I believe that most of you have already known the difference in between SSRS 2005 and SSRS 2008 and if you have not, you can simply visit Microsoft website (http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/reporting.aspx).
Some differences I notice are:
1. SSRS 2008 is a lot easier to setup and configure. The Reports and the ReportManager folder are easier to configure and the integration with Sharepoint is a lot easier as well. I have had a chance to try the SSRS 2008 service with ASPHostDirectory (http://www.asphostdirectory.com) and they are able to setup my SSRS 2008 beautifully. I can remote connect to my SSRS and I can administer all my reports online.
2. SSRS 2008 come with the newest Ad-Hoc queries and this feature is only available if you have SQL 2008 Standard Edition or above. My current host, ASPHostDirectory, supports Ad-Hoc query and I believe that they must have at least SQL 2008 installed. I do not have pretty much time to play around this Ad-Hoc report yet but what I can tell you is that this is a very powerful reporting tool.
Keep up the good work, Microsoft!