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Issue

This customer had designed a progress report, using SQL Server Reporting Services.   Although the report was returning the correct data, they were facing a performance issue and the report was taking over 10 minutes to generate.  

In today’s world speed is everything—we are very aware of that.  Waiting for your report to generate is time wasted. Let’s see how our services helped this customer get back on track.

Solution

For this specific client we focused on three main areas: report processing, report rendering and query execution .   Here are some ways we improved upon these things:

• Rendering Formats

Reports can be exported into various rendering formats through rendering extensions.  It is important to make sure you are using the right format to satisfy your business requirements.

• Pagination

Reports are rendered into pages based on where page breaks occur. Although the entire report is processed before the rendering phase, the performance of the rendering extension is significantly impacted by the page size.  Our team optimized these breaks to ensure maximum efficiency in rendering.

• Optimizing Report Queries

To reduce overall processing time, first we had to decide which data to retrieve from the data source and which calculations to include in the report. The functionality of data sources and the structure of the report determine which operations should be done in the query, as opposed to which operations should be done inside of the report. Although the Reporting Services processing engine is capable of doing complex calculations such as grouping, sorting, filtering, data aggregation, and expression evaluations; it is generally the database system that is best optimized to process some or all of these data operations.

After going over all above and some additional steps, our team were able to re-provide the report through reporting services in more effective and efficient way.  After our team finished, this client’s report processing time went from 10 minutes to to under one minute. Over a 90% improvement!