Question

Is there any point in using SSRS to host your reports if you are only going to have one application using your SQL Server?

I would have thought SSRS makes sense only if you are going to host reports that are going to be consumed by several separate applications.

Answer 1

Is there any point in using SSRS to host your reports if you are only going to have one application using your SQL Server?

Yes.

I would have thought SSRS makes sense only if you are going to host reports that are going to be consumed by several separate applications.

I can think of two use cases for SSRS deployments for single applications (although I’m sure there are more):

• If you have complex reporting requirements. Computationally expensive reports that require lots of CPU cycles to construct (bottleneck: Client’s Celeron), simple reports that require lots of data to build (bottleneck: Client’s ADSL), or anything in between will fall in to this category. It makes sense to do all the processing on powerful servers, and then render the result back to the client.

• If you want easy management of reports separate to application releases. I help maintain an application which has both the application and reports distributed in each release. Because new releases are typically a big deal, we avoid them where possible. This means that if there’s no maintenance required in the application, we can go 3 months between releases. This means small fixes to reports aren’t pushed out to clients as fast as possible. Same goes for new reports (clients love new reports). If everything was controlled via SSRS, we could add/edit/remove reports as required.

The latter use case requires readily available access to SSRS to make sense, it’s probably best suited to multi-tenant applications.