Once in a while, I’ll run a scheduled report and for whatever reason, the report won’t return any data.  It ran just fine — no errors, no failures — but there’s just no data in the body.  The reports are saved into various folders on the network.  In thumbing through these folders, I can spot the reports that ran with no data quickly.  It’s the ones that have a certain file size.

In my case, the report in question renders at 67 KB if it’s empty.  Dashboards with graphs, sparklines, and other fixed-size objects will show a little variance in size if a section is empty.  Table rows, on the other hand, will have a much greater impact on the file size when they are populated.  The exaggerated file size difference then makes spotting the blank ones much easier.

So, next time you open a report and you find the content to be empty, take note of the file size.  That number will raise a red flag for you whenever you see it and hopefully help you to catch (and correct) it before your users do.

There are few things more frustrating than running a demo of a new report for your users, telling them how fast it is, then having Report Server deliver your three-second report in thirty-three seconds because the server had to wake up first.  Until Microsoft makes the sleep setting for RS configurable to something other than twenty minutes, the best solution I have heard comes from Steve Wake of the Denver SQL Users Group.

Steve said his company runs a report every fifteen minutes to keep the server at attention.  I didn’t ask what was in the report, but I’m assuming it’s one of two things:

• The report is blank, so from a code standpoint it can’t fail, and it won’t consume any resources beyond the bare minimum.
• The report is for monitoring or auditing, and needs to be run every fifteen minutes anyway.

In either case, it’s a simple and practical solution and I couldn’t help but grin when I set it up on my server.