Report Performance Complaints

If you’re responsible for the IT of your organization, chances are you’re going to get complaints about performance. Complaints specifically on report performance from your line of business application. Your line of business application being the critical application that basically drives the service or product that your company delivers to your clients.

So, let’s talk about report performance and basically database performance and some key things that you can do.

Always, always, always talk to a vendor.

Talk to the vendor who is responsible for maintaining upgrading all that kind of fun stuff. Get specific criteria from your end users as to:

1.      Is it specific reports?

2.      Is it specific times?

3.      Is it specific selection criteria?

Try to nail that down and then find what is unacceptable. Talk to the vendor but talk openly. Don’t make it sound as if it’s the vendor’s fault or they have to fix it or the end users are crazy or whatever, and just see what they say. If they sound like they’re reading from a script that means they have a problem & don’t know how to fix it or they’re not really paying attention or giving you much credit for understanding the problem.

But here’s a couple of things you can do.

Look at the hardware the application is running on. Now, usually you will have these in virtual environments where you are Hyper-V and VMWare or the like. If that’s the case then what you want to try to do is isolate the database so it’s on the fastest hard drives possible, SSDs when possible, and spread out over multiple drives so you get the best bang for your buck. Because quite honestly it’s the disc IO that slows most reports down.

And that’s the one thing you have under your control as well as adding more memory. Databases love memory.

We can get into all sorts of questions about data cashing and all that kind of fun stuff if you’re interested.

But talk to the vendor, take a look at the hard drive configurations, especially if you can create separate areas for temp DBs and the like.

So, let us know if you’re having this problem and it’s really driving you nuts because sometimes two heads are better than one!