Report Server Databases

The SSRS catalog encompasses two databases: Report Server database (the default name is ReportServer ) and Report Server temporary database (the default name is ReportServerTempDB ). Report Server database is a SQL Server database that stores part of SSRS configuration, report definitions, report metadata, report history, cache policy, snapshots, resources, security settings, encrypted data, scheduling and delivery data, and extension information.

Note

Although users can certainly directly access databases in the SSRS catalog and directly modify objects that SSRS uses, this is not a recommended (or supported) practice. Underlying data and structures within the SSRS catalog are not guaranteed to be compatible between different releases of SSRS, service packs , or patches.

Please treat the ReportServer database as one of the production databases. Although many developers store report detentions (RDL) in a separate repository, and, thus, RDL is often recoverable, a loss of snapshot data can carry a negative business impact. For example, users might make some business decisions using snapshot's capabilities to report "frozen-in-time" data.

Another database that SSRS uses is the Report Server temporary database. This database is responsible for storing intermediate processing products, such as cached reports , and session and execution data.

Note

To store temporary snapshots in the file system, instead of the database, administrators should complete the following steps. First modify RSReportServer.config and set WebServiceUseFileShareStorage and WindowsServiceUseFileShareStorage to True .

Then set FileShareStorageLocation to a fully qualified path. The default path is C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\RSTempFiles .

Unlike SQL Server's tempdb , data in ReportServerTempDB survives SQL Server and Report Server restarts. Report Server periodically cleans expired and orphan data in ReportServerTempDB .

All data in ReportServerTempDB can be deleted at any time with minimal or no impact. The minimal impact that a user might experience, for example, is a temporary performance reduction due to lost cache data and a loss of an execution state. The execution state is stored in the table SessionData . Loss of the execution state results in an error: "Execution 'j4j3vfblcanzv3qzcqhvml55' cannot be found (rsExecutionNotFound)." To resolve the loss of the execution state, a user would need to reopen a report.

Tip

SSRS does not recover deleted ReportServerTempDB or tables within this database. To quickly recover from erroneous deletions of objects in this database, keep a script or a backup of an empty ReportServerTempDB handy.

In a scale-out deployment, the SSRS catalog is shared across all of the report servers in the deployment.