Any opinions on reporting solutions in general, including SSRS?

Question

Any opinions on reporting solutions in general, including SSRS?

vhanda

SSCrazy

Points: 2240
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March 22, 2006 at 8:41 am

#112401

Hello all,
I'm currently tasked with researching and recommending a reporting solution usable in an extranet kind of situation. One of the candidates is SSRS 2005. I'm also looking at Crystal Reports XI, ActiveReports .Net, or just rolling our own solution using SQL Server and ASP/ASP.Net.
From what I've read it seems that everyone has had good and bad experiences with all of these products. Pricing and licensing with Crystal Reports Server is just plain stupid so will most likely be dropped from my list, but can anyone share their experiences with SSRS 2005 and/or ActiveReports?
Thanks for any input.
Vik

Viewing 8 posts - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

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MVDBA (Mike Vessey) SSC-Insane Points: 21797 More actions · Answer 1

I've been using crystal back from version 7 and while the product is now so much better it's also far too expensive

SQL server 2005 reporting services is actually pretty good if you can use a little imagination to get round some of the functional limitations.

we've also used cognos as well - but really it's no better than any other product and isn't very well supported.

ASP.net reports can be good, but development time for a simple report is so much more than RS (also security, scheduled reports, parameters etc take much longer)

if you do go down the route of using RS then you have the advantage that you can expand the functionality with products like chartFX and any other .net components you can lay your hands on.

if you're buying new and not fitting around an existing architecture then RS2005 looks to be the real cost saver in the long run.

MVDBA

vhanda SSCrazy Points: 2240 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks for the input, Michael.

I realize that rolling our own solution would require reinventing the wheel regarding scheduling, automating report generation, etc. But given our previous experience with the sheer, er, crappiness of older versions of Crystal and some not-very-positive reviews of most of the other products I'm tempting to chuck the whole lot and just use what we have with SQL and ASP. More of a frustration reaction than anything else, I admit.

Good point about the 3rd party .Net components with RS 2005, though.

Thanks again,

Vik

Mauricio Ramirez SSC Rookie Points: 43 More actions · Answer 3

Hi!.

We developed a solution for a customer using SSRS. Here is our story:

1. We didn't want to use the Enterprise Version of SSRS so we developed kind of a proxy for using the SSRS INTRANET only version in order to be able to publish the reports out in the internet. As you are doing an extranet application you will have to do the same and let me tell you it is not easy.

2. You have to buy Visual Studio for the development, a cost that must be added to the total solution.

3. Its development interface is very terse but functional. You can do many things with it, but not all of your necessities will be covered. You will have to develop some of the reports in ASP anyway.

4. After more than 300 reports in our solution we have paid the price because the SSRS is a very slow solution and has limitations in the number of records that you can handle. For instance a report that comprises 200,000 records simply won't work. Worst, every time one of our users try to run it, it crashes the RS and it won't recover from that. We have to reboot the server!!!

5. As with every product coming out of the Microsoft factory, we have to deal with the bugs and limitations until version 7.0 is out!

Have a nice day.

Mauricio Ramirez

MV Ltda.

Luke L SSC-Dedicated Points: 35547 More actions · Answer 4

I've used Crystal, Cognos, and have written my own using Cold Fusion. I much prefer writing my own stuff, mainly because I can get exactly what I want everytime. It may take a bit longer to develop some things, but the payoff is you get exactly what you want everytime. There's no limitations to your own imagination.

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vhanda SSCrazy Points: 2240 More actions · Answer 5

Mauricio, what version of SSRS are you using that's giving you so many headaches?

Vik

vhanda SSCrazy Points: 2240 More actions · Answer 6

Hey has anyone used ReCrystallize Pro to generate ASP pages for Crystal Reports? Looks promising and a heck of a lot cheaper than Crystal Reports Server:

http://www.recrystallize.com/

Vik

Mauricio Ramirez SSC Rookie Points: 43 More actions · Answer 7

We are using SSRS (SP 2) over a SQL Server 2000 server with SP4.

We run every report using a Stored Procedure tuned with indexes and manual work. But the time that RS uses to process the reports has scalated with no reason. For instance, a moderately complex report takes 5 seconds in the Stored Procedure to return the data and RS almost 2 minutes to produce any output at all.

And it is a table report.

And our simultaneous user load is about 5. Imagine what is going to happen when a 100 or a 1000 comes in! It my daily dose of nightmare!

I have read that Cognos goes for thousands of reports generated per minute. I think, if that is true, it is miles ahead of SSRS.

Also, I'm temptated to use the Jasper Open Source Java-based Solution

http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/

The problem is that moving to another platform is a horrible decision to make.

The server I'm using to produce the reports is a Double XEON CPU at 3.0 Ghz.

I hope it helps.

Mauricio Ramirez