SSRS vs Crystal Reports Performance

Question

We are doing a conversion of Crystal Reports to SSRS. One thing we noticed was that the crystal viewer launches faster than ssrs. However, in crystal it buffers in the remaining data. To be clear, if I request 5 records run. The viewer launches in Crystal with recordset 1, however records 2-5 are not accessible till all supporting reads are complete.

In SSRS, nothing displays till records 1-5 are completly accessible to the viewer.

Giving the illusion that Crystal is faster than SSRS. In fact, I've done time tests same data same report. SSRS beats Crystal everytime in overall request completion. But Crystal displays information to the user more quickly.

Any settings or anything to mimic the behavior of Crystal on SSRS?

A little more digging revealed that the feature on the Crystal Webserver is 'page on demand' processing.

Answer 1

SSRS will try to do this automatically, but there are many things in the report definition that could prevent it.

I think the most likely culprits are sorting at the report level and page numbers. Move the sorts into your query, and take them out of your report definition. Otherwise, SSRS needs to retrieve all data to determine what the first row will be.

There are some nice tips on MSDN for this.