Michael Flanagan


I am new to Reporting Services and hope that what I am looking to do is within capabilities :-)

I have many identical schema databases residing on a number of data servers. These support individual clients accessing them via a web interface. What I need to be able to do is run reports across all of the databases. So the layout is:

Dataserver A

Database A1

Database A2

Database A3

Dataserver B

Database B1

Database B2

Dataserver C

Database C1

Database C2

Database C3

I would like to run a report that pulls table data from A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, C1, C2, C3

Now the actual number of servers is 7 and the number of databases is close to 1000. All servers are running SQL2005.

Is this something that Reporting Services is able to handle or do I need to look at some other solution

Thanks,

Michael




Re: Multi-database Multi-server

Alexandre Mineev MSFT


I think your are fine. RS report can access tables from multiple databases at once or you will also be able to write a report that aims one database, but it changes depending on, for example, user preference.





Re: Multi-database Multi-server

Michael Flanagan

I guess I should also point out that I am wondering if RS offers some sort of "enhanced" ability to consolodate the data from all of these databases. I need to get aggregates from all of these databases and doing joins across 1000+ just won't work. So short of having to create a single reporting database - is there a better way to get this info

If for example I have these 1000 databases that are all identical with regards to schema (one database per client) and in each of the databases is a sales detail table. Now I want to be able to query across all of the databases (or a subset if I so desire) and find out how many sales of a particular item took place on a particular day. I also need this to be real-time (or at least within the last few seconds).

Is this a common issue I would think so but in searching the net and forums I haven't found a effective solution...






Re: Multi-database Multi-server

Anonymous

I would like more info on this as well. I also have a similar question - How can Reporting Services ask the user what credentials they're logging in with, and then point to the corresponding databases they have access to, and then allow the user to specify the databases they want to run reports against How can you write reports to change the database they point to depending on user login




Re: Multi-database Multi-server

Alexandre Mineev MSFT

RS currently does not do joins - you will need to push them into SQL query.

What you can do in RS report is to create separate datasets querying separate databases and show results in separate report dataregions. But again you will not be able to join data from multiple report datasets inside of report.






Re: Multi-database Multi-server

Alexandre Mineev MSFT

Report uses datasource structure to connect to a database. Query string in datasource is an expression, so you can write it in such a way that it gives different results depending on user. How exactly you do it is up to you. It may be a hard-coded switch statement or may be you can put it into some table and query this table with applying username as a filter... Many options exist