This is going to be a small blog post, where I’ll be showing how can you control the size of your ReportServer Database. Most of the times I’ve seen Report Server Administrators ignoring a very useful setting and screaming – “Not sure why Report Server Catalog is growing out of control in size!!…”
There’s a setting called “Number of Snapshots in Report History” which by default will be “Unlimited“.
What are these Snapshots in Report History? These are nothing but read only view of your Reports at that particular point of time when the report was stored in history – Very similar to Database Snapshots. Whatever changes you make to your report after the time where snapshot was taken will not be applied to your snapshots.
So where do these Snapshots get stored?? In your ReportServer Database!
Where can i Change this Setting?
In your Report Manager or from SSMS(connecting to to your SSRS Server).
From Report Manager:
You can change your Site Settings(Global) – applies to all the Reports or You can override this site level setting at individual Report level as well. Please see the screenshot below.
From SSMS:
Connect to your SSRS Instance and Right click on the Instance and navigate to Properties. Choose History Tab as shown below and you can change these settings at Site Level.
Hope this helps and if you are not aware of this setting and i strongly recommend you to look into this option. In fact you can create a Job which removes Snapshots from your Report Catalog based on number of days you’ve defined. I’ve seen many companies using 60-90 days. Your requirement may vary!
MSSQLTREK 