Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Reporting with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

11.2. Scalability Planning

One way to manage Reporting Services content on a SharePoint site is to store all reports in a single report library and all data sources in a single data connection library, but before long, you'll find that the number of reports and related files become so large that it is difficult to manage security, to find content, or even to browse through them using built-in display methods such as out-of-the-box SharePoint list views. It is common in the early stage of designing a business intelligence application to wonder how many reports or data sources can exist in a single document library.

This surprisingly simple question can reveal a lot about the scalability considerations of your Business Intelligence solutions deployed to SharePoint. A while ago Microsoft, published a white paper titled Working with Large Lists in Office SharePoint Server 2007 (http://www.devhorizon.com/go/8), which is one of the best papers published with regard to best practices in scaling your SharePoint lists without an adverse impact on farm performance. The test results in this white paper demonstrate the best practices for accessing and working with extremely large lists. The whitepaper also evaluates the performance characteristics of large SharePoint lists under various loads and modes of operation. Although this white paper appears to be focused exclusively on SharePoint lists, report and data connection libraries are special document libraries, and document libraries, in ...