asked
Help me SSRS mythbusters
I've inherited thousands of rdl files. There is no commenting in the SQL commandtext in a lot of those files. The previous incumbent said that the team had had problems with rdls corrupting in the past and they believed the cause was the file size exceeding a certain number of characters. Part of their "solution" was to religiously eliminate extraneous characters like white space and comments from the SQL in the rdls. Which makes it fun to read. Sounds like nonsense to me but in the spirit of open-mindedness I thought I'd see if anyone else has heard of this phenomenon before.
First of all I always prefer stored procedures as they are far superior. Moreover, can you please let us know what error message they were getting which concluded the rdl file was corrupted? I beleive the file size increases more with embedded objects like images. Since 4 MB is the maximum size, where an HTTP exception is thrown, I cannot think of an SQL CommandText with size near to 4 MB. As per BOL > The report server does not limit the > size of a report or model that you > publish. However, Microsoft
ASP.NET > imposes a maximum size for items that > are posted to the server. By default, > this limit is 4 megabytes (MB). If you > upload or publish a file that exceeds > this limit to a report server, you > receive an HTTP exception. In this > case, you can modify the default by > increasing the value of the > maxRequestLength element in the > Machine.config file. > > Although a report model might be very > large, report definitions rarely > exceed 4 MB. A more typical report > size is in the order of kilobytes > (KB). However, if you include embedded > images, the encoding of those images > can result in large report definitions > that exceed the 4 MB default. Hope it debunks this myth :)
