Dantheman-Inc. Technology Blog
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Why You Should Schedule SSRS Reports
February 5th, 2012 by admin
Many of the approaches to modern business management that are popular today require access and utilization of a huge number of reports produced by computer systems. These reports reflect both the current state of the business and the trends surrounding it, with a goal of making it easier for managers to see what is happening around them and what they need to do in order to improve the performance of their teams. Though SQL Server Reporting Services can be run manually on demand, it is often better to just schedule SSRS reports to run automatically.
If you do not schedule SSRS reports, then they will only be run when someone believes they are needed. This will often be adequate to meet the needs of the company, but that may not always be the case. There could be times when a report would be invaluable to decision making, but no one has actually realized that yet. It could also be the case that the person who would want to see the reports is not in a position to easily contact the people with direct access to the ability to create them. Simply setting them up to run on a schedule will make sure that reports are being created and made available on a regular basis.
While reports do take up storage space, the decision to schedule SSRS reports really does not place a serious burden on a company’s computing infrastructure in that sense. Storage solutions have become remarkably cheap in the last few years, to the point where many Internet companies are offering many gigabytes of storage space for free to anyone who cares to sign up for their services. In an environment like this, the value of those reports greatly outweighs the trivial cost of archiving and storing them.
While it is not strictly necessary to schedule SSRS reports to be created automatically in order to take advantage of having access to such reports, it is a good way of ensuring that they will be available when needed. It can also be a good way to look at how the data is changing over time.