Takeaways
KF: What can readers learn from Microsoft IT's experience with SQL Server 2005 and Reporting Services? Frank, what are the four most important aspects of Reporting Services, specifically?
Frank: First, Reporting Services is for pre-built reports, not ad hoc reports. So if you want to build reports for a wide range of users, Reporting Services is great—either with Report Builder or Report Designer, depending on the complexity of your reports. If you have experienced report writers or developers, you can produce reports very fast—as long as you know the schemas. Not only is it a central source of reports, but it's a fast way to get reports. Second is security: You can keep individuals' credentials and marry that to a security role. Third is scheduling: You can schedule reports to run, and they can run under blanket credentials or under user credentials. Fourth is drill-down and drill-through: If you have other sources that users need to go to, or even within the cube itself, you can build links into the report and users can even go to another data source and find out what a particular cell is worth. For our users, that's probably the number one thing. Being able to go from the same report that had the summary information back to actual transaction details is very valuable—even into a different data source.
KF: Stuart, was anything surprising to you during the dogfood period?
Stuart: I'll speak as a CIO who came from outside of Microsoft. My general experience with any new release from most software companies is that you get new features, but performance is a secondary focus and future service packs deliver performance tuning. What surprised me is that we got all the performance in this release. Without any tuning, we got a 25 to 30 percent performance improvement, not only in our SAP environment but also in our Siebel deployment and some of our internally developed applications. We really worked hard with the product team on performance, recoverability, and scalability. We got that without a lot of tuning, or developing indexes.
KF: Ron, what did you find most valuable with your SQL Server 2005 deployment?
Ron: I liked the database consolidation. Our storage utilization was about 30 percent because everyone buys the amount of storage they'll need for 3 to 5 years. With the SQL Server 2005 deployment, we consolidated our storage into a storage service. Now we only do central storage purchasing, and we can drive storage utilization up to about 80 percent. I liked the fact that I could build broader skills in my people. I liked the fact that I could better manage my compliance efforts, including the security components. And I liked that my users are empowered.
For us, empower, simplify, and protect are three things we want to do, so we could tie our SQL Server 2005 deployment to those three pillars.
Ron Markezich
Stuart Scott
Frank Schneider
Karen Forster (karen@windowsitpro.com) is editorial and strategy director for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine and former director of Windows Server User Assistance at Microsoft.
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