Large Reports for MSRS

Question

I have a report that needs to be able to render a very large amount of pages (about 4500 in this instance) in a web browser. The total time needed to finish on the report server from start time to end time is about 30 mins for the instance that I am looking at. Does anyone know what options exist for handling the rendering of such a large report in a web browser?

In terms of looking into how this can be resolved I have already performed the following tasks. The report gets its data off of a database table that already has the data flattened to the point that the TimeDataRetrieval on the report server is 17812 or about 18 secs. The report itself has been reformatted to include the least expensive report objects that it can in order to render the data in the correct format. I basically consists of a table with about 4 nested tables and thats it. We were trying to accomplish this on a 2005 report server but continued to run into memory issues that were not feasible for our clients. In response to that we moved this onto a 2008 report server to take advantage of the fact that it uses the file system instead of memory and finally were able to get this to work without running out of the available memory but of course it takes much longer.

Answer 1

I would say this is impossible, a browser is not ment to handle that amount of data. I find it hard to believe anyone is finding a 4500 page report useful though.

If that data is in approximately the same format for all the pages you should split this up into a master-subreport style report. Have a main report of a couple of pages full of links to the other subreports.