I’m looking for fast reporting services that are compatible with .Net (C# specifically). Additionally since many of these companies are coy about their pricing (e.g. Cognos) it would be helpful to know how expensive they tend to be.
We are doing serial reporting to PDF and Excel from a SQL Server 2005 database. Specifically because of the number of reports being generated (e.g. 6,000 20 printed page reports) at a time, we’re looking for a fast solution.
We do a dump of the reports to PDF and them FTP the reports to an external entity for their consumption. We produce about 30 different types of reports, but we may produce the same report several thousand times for each key item in our database. Each report will be fed by 5-15 simple queries (only a few joins and sometimes a group by). I’m not particularly concerned with the query times, but rather the time to render to a memory stream (or serialize to disk if that is significantly different from solution to solution).
If you already have sql 2005 then reporting services is free. It natively supports rendering reports to Excel and PDF and has pretty extensive documentation and examples to get you started.
The designer is integrated into visual studio and the management options on the server side can make even some pretty complex subscription and delivery scenarios pretty easy to accomplish. For example, data driven subscriptions give you a built in way to drive the scheduled creation of reports that are delivered via several delivery options (email, file share etc (you can add more)).
When you say fast – I think SSRS fits both cases. Not only should the ramp up be fast because you are already using SQL so you know the MSFT toolset but the performance and architecture (easy scale out of just the reporting server) is going to be sufficient for what you are doing.