SSRS vs Azure SQL Reporting - Cost and Implementation

Question

I have currently implemented some reports for a demo project using Azure reporting and Report builder. Now we are going to develop the reports properly I have a few questions about SSRS.

1. We need subscription and scheduling so I guess we have to set up a SSRS server, can this be hosted on Azure or where is a good place? We have no servers of our own.
2. What cost is involved for licensing?
3. Our application is an MVC 4 app and I believe this may cause problems for hosting the report viewer (no post backs). What would be the best approach for an integrated experience for running the reports?

Thank you

Solution 1

Be aware that Microsoft's recommendation of installing ssrs on one Azure VM using the SQL Enterprise gallery image will cost you over $1600 per month and does not meet the requirement of two instances for Microsoft's SLA and does not provide High Availability (HA). We are pretty frustrated with Microsoft right now about this.

Solution 2

SQL Reporting will discontinue service on October 31, 2014.

Solution 3

Old question but I just happened accross it so here's some quick answers:

Windows Azure SQL Reporting (aka SQL Azure Reporting Services) is being discontinued on 31/Oct/2014

Instead Microsoft are recommending the (frankly much less confusing) option of installing SSRS on an Azure VM. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-provision-sql-server/

So to answer (1) yes you can run SSRS on an Azure VM

(2) - licensing - Azure lets you pay directly for VMs that include SSRS. For example you can get SQL Server Standard 2012 (which includes SSRS) on a "Small" Server 2012 vm for about £64 per month - see here for pricing http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/#sql-server

Just choose 'new VM' and then 'choose from gallery' and choose an image that has SQL Server Standard or Enterprise.

(3) Report Viewer component - you are right that the ReportViewer component runs as classic ASP.NET rather than as an MVC item. However you can mix classic ASP.NET pages with MVC views/controllers within the same project if you are careful. See this related question: Would the MSFT Report Viewer (rdlc) Work with MVC

Solution 4

Costs must have gone up, as its now ~£183 for SQL Standard and ~£8 for Windows Server A0, so I reckon its ~£191 per month now to use Reporting Services in Azure which is a lot more than the old Azure Reporting. You can attempt to use the SQL Server Web edition image, but it won't connect to data sources other than SQL Server Web edition.

Solution 5

EDIT 2015-07-21: Windows Azure SQL Reporting was discontinued by Microsoft on October 31, 2014 - the original answer contained links to Azure SQL Reporting documentation that no longer works and have been removed

1. Subscriptions and scheduling are not supported by Azure SQL Reporting, so you would have to set up SSRS somewhere. On-premise or Azure-hosted VM depends on a lot of factors such as your budget, on-premise infrastucture capacity, overall cloud strategy of your organisation.

2. You need to be more specific - the cost of licensing what? Azure SQL Reporting? Virtual Machines? SQL Server licensing?

3. This article should get you started with app integration for SSRS: Integrating Reporting Services into Applications

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