Performance Enhancements - Reports - Update
Dateline: Roseville - August 6, 2008 - Stephanie Fury

 

Reports on fire!

In addition to the information in the release notes, I'd like to provide some more detail on the performance increases of several reports.

Keep in mind that what our development team has accomplished is much more than just making the reports available to the user more quickly. They are also no longer locking any data, thus causing contention/performance problems for other reports or processes. They are also being much more friendly to SQL Server so it can attend to other tasks.

 

Let's take a look at the numbers...

Report Reads before Reads after CPU (secs) before CPU after
Pos03a
165,432
28,676
15.7
.6
Pos03b
164,309
28480
14.2
.7
Fiscal07a
420,834
251,255
20.4
4.2

In the case of the first two reports, you can see that we are now reading only 1/6th as much data, and we are completing the read operation nearly 30 times faster. The third report is completing five times faster. Other reports that were updated in this release show similar gains. And keep in mind this is during a time when we are also developing new reports, and fixing non performance related issues in others.

These tests were performed on our own test server. What about in the real world? Ventura COE recently went live with version 08.06 on their production system. This means the important Ledger04 report performance enhancements are now available to their users. We have reviewed the statistics for this report before and after, and they show:

Average time to complete - before: 54.7 seconds, after: 3.4 seconds. That's over 16 times faster.

We know all users will appreciate both the performance gains of the reports themselves, not to mention that they are no longer causing locking issues. We thank you for your patience as we work through these issues.

Comments are appreciated! Send us an email and let us know what you think.