If you’re familiar with subscriptions in SQL Server Reporting Services, you may have wondered what the “Null Delivery Provider” is for. While it may seem odd to deliver the reports to a black hole, it does come in handy from time to time. In this post, I’ll show you how the “Null Delivery Provider” can help you increase performance by automatically creating cached reports. The basic idea is to create a data-driven subscription to run the report with a number of different parameter values to build the cached copies. This is similar to creating Execution Snapshots, but in this case we can specify a number of different sets of parameters, where as Execution Snapshots allow only one set of parameters. The “Null Delivery Provider” allows you to do this without having to save the reports somewhere, taking up valuable disk space, or have them emailed to someone, taking up valuable sanity.

In case you’re not familiar with cached reports, SSRS lets you create copies (or “caches”) of a report after the data has been gathered, but before the report has actually been rendered. When a user runs the report, it’s rendered from the cached copy which already has all the data. This means the queries don’t have to be run every time the report is generated. If you’d like to read more about report caching, there are some good articles on MSDN.

This example uses the Product Line Sales SSRS 2005 sample report. Everything for this example still works the same in SSRS 2008. Continue reading SSRS: Improve Performance by Automating Report Caching Using Null Delivery Provider →