RDLC vs RDL Revisited

I have searched the archive of this forum, and based on some previous answers have read the followin FAQ

http://www.gotreportviewer.com/

However, even so, I still have a questoin about when to use RDLC vs RDL from the point of view of licensing and load sharing betwee DB and report server.

1. As we all know that SSRS will take a license of SQL Server if the web service is deployed on any other machine other than SQL Server (which is normally the case because no serious DBA will allow IIS apps to be installed on the DB Server). Also, if the SSRS is deployed on NLB cluster then each node of the cluster would need a "SQL Enterprise" license. (which can be very expensive).

2. Co deploying the SSRS with SQL Server is a bad idea because it puts excessive load on the DB+Report Server.

3. Since there is no "load balancing" in SQL all the rendering has to be done by the SSRS service which is running on the DB Server.

Now compare this to RDLC

1. RDLC gives me the same engine as RDL

2. However it has no licensing tags to it.

3. I can deploy ASP.NET report viewer on my web farm and scale it out as much as I like.

4. Extract data from the DB using stored procedures.

So it seems that RDLC solution is cheaper, gives better scale out capabilities and also moves the rendering of reports on the web farm rather than the Report Server.

Why should me or anyone else choose RDL at all?

There seems to be one disadvantage that the data has to fetched programmatically and manually binded (like an ASP.NET app) as RDLC does not provide any feature to connect to data sources. But this is not much when you see the cost and scalability benefits.

regards,

Abhishek.

bump!|||You have some great reasons for using RDLC.

A few off the top-of-my-head advantages for using RDL rather than RDLC.

1. Subscriptions
2. Caching / Snapshots
3. Role Based security
4. "My Reports"
5. Configuration / Definitions stored in Report Catalog DB
6. Additional rendering formats
7. Sharepoint webparts integration

Without a doubt you can implement similar functionality in your application hosting the RDLC, but these are out of the box when you're using the report server.

I have had several clients start out heading down the road of wanting to use RDLC to avoid the licensing fees. In the end, they all ended up using the report server. There's no one size fits all solution and in many cases, RDLC would be a valuable choice.

Hope this helps.|||

Thanks, I also found information on the MSDN site.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345248.aspx

regards,

Abhishek.