I was working with a third party vendor to set up SQL Reporting Services. The reporting services install was on a remote server, while the database for SQL Reporting services was on a remote SQL Server.  Once SQL Reporting Services was installed and I was using the Reporting Services Configuration Tool, I kept getting an error when trying to create the Reporting Service database.  The error was non- specific and said I should look into permissions.  I checked permissions and determined that was not the problem.

One interesting note in this case was that there was already a database for another SQL Reporting Services install on the SQL Server named ReportServer, which is the default name. Because of that, I had to change the default name of the database for this install to a different name other than the default – in this case it was EdgeSightReportServer.

The configuration tool would create the databases as requested on the SQL server, but would give errors when running the scripts post creation. In looking at the logs, I found errors stating that the database could not be found – the name of the database in the log was ‘EdgeSight’. The ReportServer portion of the name had been removed when the script ran, and of course was nowhere to be found. [more]

The error was that ‘EdgeSight’ database did not exist. Indeed it did not. The big question is why did the script say Use EdgeSight to start with? I then set out to try the following:

  • Try to configure reporting services with a database named XYZReportServer
  • Try to configure reporting services with a database named XYZ

What needs to be kept in mind is that the default name for a SQL Reporting Services database is ReportServer.  Generating scripts for these two different database names gave some interesting results.  No errors with the database name as XYZ.  But XYZReportServer will generate the error.  Further testing showed that [AnyName]ReportServer generated this error.  Any other database name worked.

So what’s with this?  I briefly searched and did not find anything on this subject.  Is it a bug?  a feature?  Is it something that only I have experienced? Who knows, but in the meantime if you are getting an error creating a reporting services database check the name.