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Executive Summary
Database Management Systems (DBMS) are the hidden engines behind some of the most critical information applications - including Enterprise Resource Management (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and accounting systems. Perhaps the most popular DBMS platform currently in use today on the Windows® platform is Microsoft® SQL Server. With its ease of use, high levels of scalability and reliability, and broad industry support, it is the solution of choice for many customers. Because the type of information stored in these databases is critical to the continued success of a company, it is imperative to adequately protect it in the event of a major server outage or site-wide disaster.
Protecting the data assets stored by SQL is the first step to providing protection and the ability to recover quickly. The second step, which is most commonly overlooked in the initial phases of a recovery plan, is protecting the application itself. While protecting the data is definitely the key to successful recovery, the data is of no use if users are not able to access it. Double- Take®, from Double-Take Software, is the most relied-upon solution for real-time replication of critical data and automated failover for application availability. It allows for the complete recovery of any Microsoft® Windows application and the data associated with it - even Microsoft SQL Server and its databases. Many Double-Take customers replicate their SQL Server data across any distance to provide nearly instant recovery.
The same real-time replication capabilities that Double-Take provides for disaster recovery and high availability can also be used in other ways. Many IT organizations use Double-Take to reduce or even eliminate the impact of scheduled and ad-hoc reporting on their production databases when using Microsoft SQL Reporting Services. Offloading the reporting process to a secondary server can greatly increase the production server's performance and scalability.
This whitepaper discusses reporting strategies for Microsoft SQL Reporting Services using Double-Take and a secondary, real-time copy of production SQL data sources. It will address the following issues:
- What benefit is there in using non-production databases as data sources for Microsoft SQL Reporting Service?
- How does Double-Take provide real-time replication of Microsoft SQL data and guarantee data integrity?
- How can leveraging Double-Take and realtime replication help with a Microsoft SQL Reporting Services deployment?
What is SQL Reporting Services?
First introduced for Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and now an integrated component of SQL Server 2005, SQL Reporting Services streamlines and simplifies the process of extracting data from a wide range of data sources and provides the ability to generate a variety of reports on the extracted data. It includes a reporting engine for processing and formatting the reports as well as a report designer for creating and viewing reports.
SQL Reporting Services extends the capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server to provide server-based enterprise reporting. Reports can be delivered in various different formats and even combined with other Microsoft products like Microsoft SharePoint® Server and Microsoft Office to enable information workers to quickly analyze data and disseminate it throughout an organization.
How Does SQL Reporting Services Interact with SQL Server?
In a typical SQL Reporting Services configuration, SQL Reporting Services can be used to query current, "live" data from a SQL Server database or use a cached copy of the data to create the result set for a particular report. How the report is processed is determined by the report execution Properties for each report and is configurable by the administrator or SQL Database Administrator. In SQL Server 2005, there are three modes of report execution - On Demand, On Demand From Cache or From Snapshots.
With on-demand report execution, each time a user runs a report a query is made to the report data source. This results in on-demand reports that contain the most up-to-date data. Reports executed with the on demand from cache option will query the data source the first time a report is requested by a user and then will cache the results of that query for a configurable period of time. Lastly, reports that are configured to run from snapshots will use a pre-fetched copy of the results that has been retrieved at a configured schedule and saved in the SQL Reporting Services database.
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