What are the fast reporting solutions that work with .Net?

Question

I'm looking for fast reporting services that are compatible with .Net (C# specifically). Additionally since many of these companies are coy about their pricing (e.g. Cognos) it would be helpful to know how expensive they tend to be.

We are doing serial reporting to PDF and Excel from a SQL Server 2005 database. Specifically because of the number of reports being generated (e.g. 6,000 20 printed page reports) at a time, we're looking for a fast solution.

We do a dump of the reports to PDF and them FTP the reports to an external entity for their consumption. We produce about 30 different types of reports, but we may produce the same report several thousand times for each key item in our database. Each report will be fed by 5-15 simple queries (only a few joins and sometimes a group by). I'm not particularly concerned with the query times, but rather the time to render to a memory stream (or serialize to disk if that is significantly different from solution to solution).

Answer 1

I would look at using Data Dynamics Active Reporting click here. You can use them similar to Crystal Reports and they can be setup to export to PDF, Excel, Word, etc.

Answer 2

If you already have sql 2005 then reporting services is free. It natively supports rendering reports to Excel and PDF and has pretty extensive documentation and examples to get you started.

The designer is integrated into visual studio and the management options on the server side can make even some pretty complex subscription and delivery scenarios pretty easy to accomplish. For example, data driven subscriptions give you a built in way to drive the scheduled creation of reports that are delivered via several delivery options (email, file share etc (you can add more)).

When you say fast - I think SSRS fits both cases. Not only should the ramp up be fast because you are already using SQL so you know the MSFT toolset but the performance and architecture (easy scale out of just the reporting server) is going to be sufficient for what you are doing.

Answer 3

You have Reporting Services as a tag -- have you looked at SQL Server Reporting Services? It does PDF & Excel reporting. I can't speak for its speed on 6000 20-page reports at a time (6000 different reports??).

Answer 4

Cognos, SAP Business Objects, Oracle BI Suite, MicroStrategy, and Reporting Services are all basically comparable in performance on rendering to Excel and PDF from their respective report builders. All of them can potentially run into memory errors if you try to output too large of a report. Number of pages is not a good indicator of report size. You can have a 1 page report that outputs 1 million rows in HTML or a 20 page report that only outputs 40 rows per page. The 1 page report would probably fail to render because of memory constraints and the 20 page report would probably have no problems rendering.

Cognos and Business Objects will generally cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in initial licensing fees and annual maintenance support contract fees. Reporting Services obviously does not have this issue if you are already using SQL Server 2000 / 2005 / 2008. If you are running only Oracle, MySQL, or other non-Microsoft database back-ends, then purchasing a SQL Server just for reports will probably be cheaper from a licensing perspective. However, it may be more expensive from an operations overhead perspective if your company has no expertise with SQL Server. I do NOT recommend using Reporting Services as the front-end for a non-Microsoft database. Been there, done that, not worth it. Reporting Services may WORK with non-Microsoft databases, but Cognos and Business Objects do a better job abstracting away the database if you are a non-Microsoft database shop.

You may want to determine if you are going to support allowing non-IT end-users to build reports. If you are looking for a good solution for end-users, then build OLAP cubes with Analysis Services and give them access through Excel. Eliminate the need for giving them a web-based report builder. You are just asking for universe / framework / model sprawl if you give end-users a web-based report builder.

Answer 5

If you really need good performance you may want to build your own reporting service instead of using a prebuilt one. This would of course limit the flexibility, but if your reports are known beforehand it will be quite easy to report to excel using a third-party excel library.

Reporting to pdf will be tougher, but using xsl-fo and building pdf documents that way may be a good solution depending on what you need.