I have created SSRS Report using pivot and using matrix because in report we are using dynamic column display and sorting and It has 2 millions records. Report executed 2 min but rendering time take 10 minute. Please suggest approach for fast rendering.
Remove any function-related formatting (IIF(Fields!SomeField.Value>0, "white","red")) because SSRS will need to inspect every line. In fact, remove any SSRS functions you can and make SQL do the heavy lifting. I agree with #Alan that the report is still too big to be useful: ask the users what question they're trying to answer with that large of a data set and see if you can come up with a better way of answering it.
A better option for this type of analysis is Excel PowerPivot: let excel import the raw data and do the pivoting.
I am working on a trading platform that has reporting as a big portion of its business.
The set up is the following:
SQL OLTP database (about 200 tables) – rather small in number of records. (20,000 records the biggest table – but keeps growing every week)
For reporting services, SQL views are being used to query the Live Transaction Database. Imagine the result set of the views a de-normalized one, in the spirit of a data warehouse approach. Then these data sets are passed to a third party Reporting platform (like Tableau, Power Bi or SiSense), which take these data sets and throws them into Cubes (probably some columnar structure, like mono db, hadoop, etc). From there the Reports are getting generated.
Current challenges.
The SQL views (about 8). Are huge and very hard to maintain. To give you an example, one of the views outputs 100 fields. But each of these fields are calculated fields with complicated CASE statements, nested IF statements, inline Functions, and what not, which makes this view as big as 700 lines of sql code. I inherited these from anther employee and now, sadly, I have to maintain them.
Because the data grows weekly by several hundreds records (through migration and transactions) and the number of fields in the views also grow (a few every week), the cube building takes longer and longer. To give you an example, few months ago we set up the cube re-built ever 10 minutes to refresh the data (which was taking 5 minutes). Currently takes 12-15 minutes to build, so we set it up every 30 minutes. As you can imagine, this will get worse as data and the number of fields keep growing; and we kind of need the data as current as possible.
The only good thing is that once the cube is built, the reports load fast because they are being pulled form the 3rd party platform, so no concerns here.
What I have in mind
I would like to get rid of the views so I could ease the process of maintenanace and also keep at minimum the duration of the cube re-built.
Options:
to build a data warehouse. And then build SSIS packages to populate this structure with the live transactional data. The de-normalized structure would probably look very similar the views mentioned above. The draw back here is that I don’t really feel like I simplify much, actualy adding one more layer, which is the data migration from the OLTP to the OLAP (datawarehouse). And I would still have to re-build the cube.
To turn the current views into SQL Indexed Views (materialized views), but in their current state, I simply cannot do it because of the agregate and inline functions used a lot across the entire view.
Another option I red about is to built a ODS (Operational Data Store – which would be a databse that would contain the necessary tables similar to the sql views I have now – and refresh it constantly) Maybe using triggers, or, Transaction logs? But I am not sure what involves to built such thing and how hard is to maintain.
Question:
What approach should I take?
Do any of the 3 above make any sense?
Of course, I am interested in other ideas or suggestions, as well.
Thank you!
from my experience your best approach will be 1. It is costly, but will give you better benefits . Create a ROLAP DWH(i recommend Kimball's "The data warehouse toolkit" for best practices and design patterns), if you have the oportunity use a columnar data store(like amazon redshift, or sap sybase iq) and all the case statements ,nested ifs and all operations that you mentioned, would be applied on ETL time, so in the ROLAP everything is precalculated and optimized to consumption. And dont forget about aplying indexes(depending on the relying technology you use) . Some database vendors already published "indexing best practices" for ROLAP so they will tell you which type of index aply depending of the type of table(dimension) and data type for example.
I'm working on my first SSRS report and I haven't been able to find general guidelines as to how to create reports. Specifically, I would like to know what the general approach is when aggregate data is needed on a report. For example, let's say I need to show the following in my report:
Pancakes ---34
Eggs----------56
Bacon--------73
I have a several more rows like the above that need to show aggregate data. I'm currently grouping the whole row by type and then on each cell I'm showing a count as follows: [Count(Status)].
My report is already taking 45+ seconds to run. Is it generally preferable to do aggregation like this in the query? Or does this depend on the amount of data being returned? Any pointers are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
As with all SQL answers: it depends.
But generally do your aggregation in SQL. SQL server is much better at performing aggregation than the report layer. Also bringing back less rows will reduce your data transfer and the amount of data which SSRS needs to process. Usually you would only want to do the aggregation at the report layer if there are other constraints which make doing it in the SQL query impossible or if doing so will make the report more difficult to maintain in the future. (There's certainly something to be said for sacrificing a bit of performance in the name of maintainability.) One case would be when you need to display all of the data and returning two datasets is either too complicated or actually slows down the performance of the report.
As a side note, if your report is taking 45+ seconds to run then likely your SQL is not optimized very well or your report is doing a lot of complicated calculations. The more work you can put back on the SQL server the better your performance will be. SQL Server is made for crunching numbers and doing aggregations so certainly let it do what it does best when you can.
YMMV, so always do performance testing for different methods to see what works best.
I'm trying to figure out how MS Access is handling open database objects when I build and run reports.
I have dozens of queries in each report and, since my database is normalized, each query is looking at many different tables. However, I always seem to reach the point where I have so many database objects open, that Access won't let me include any more queries in the report. My idea of how the reports are being generated is probably naive, but I just assumed Access would run a query, place the data in the reports, close the query and all associated objects, and repeat. But this doesn't seem to be the case.
The only reason I even care is because I am trying to speed up my reports. I read somewhere that you shouldn't build your tables to make querying easy, but in an effort to avoid the 7 or 8 minute time-void that happens every time I try to run a report, I have re-constructed the tables so the queries can use less objects when generating the data. The tables are still normalized to an extent, but I guess the only down-side is I am technically storing calculations in the table. For example, I have to report the current age of our customer base, and instead of grouping them with a simple switch statement (which requires me to query a separate table that holds the birthday), I have placed the age ranges (18-22, 23-27, etc) directly in the table.
Anyways, if someone could enlighten me about how access is closing the database objects, maybe I can pinpoint why my reports are so slow.
Thanks
Supposing that you really have (correct) normalised tables, and the tables are really impossible to reduce, and you really need to append all those subreports in your main report, you should create temporary tables to set as your report's DataSource. It will be a little bit boring, but you can create a step where your queries are executed and generates one or more temporary tables. When these tables is created with the filtered data which you desire in the report, you should open the report much more quickly than before. After the report's exhibition/print you should drop the temp tables or mantain them just until you need those specific data, like a buffer.
Otherwise, I suggest you to consider the entyre design of your DB, if it is possible.
I Have created an SSRS Report for retrieving 55000 records using a Stored Procedure. When
executing from the Stored Proc it is taking just 3 seconds but when executing from SSRS report it is taking more than one minute. How can I solve this problem?
The additional time could be due to Reporting Services rendering the report in addition to querying the data. For example if you have 55,000 rows returned for the report and the report server then has to group, sort and/or filter those rows to render the report then that could take additional time.
I would have a look at the way the data is being grouped and filtered in the report, then review your stored procedure to see if you could offload some of that processing to the SQL code, maybe using some parameters. Try and aim to reduce the the amount of rows returned to the report to be the minimum needed to render the report and preferably try to avoid doing the grouping and filtering in the report itself.
I had such problem because of parameters sniffing in my SP. In SQL Management Studio when I run my SP, I recreated it with new execution plan (and call was very fast), but my reports used old bad plan (for another sequence of parameters) and load time was much longer than in SQL MS.
in the ReportServerDB you will find a table called ExecutionLog. you got to look up the catalog id of your report and check the latest execution instance. this can tell you the break-up of the times taken - for data retrieval, for processing, for rendering etc.
Use the SSRS Performance Dashboard reports to debug your issues.
Archaic question but because things like that are kinda recurring, my "quick and dirty" solution to improve SSRS, which works perfectly on large enterprise environments (I am rendering reports that can have up to 100.000+ lines daily) is to properly set the InteractiveSize of the page (for example, setting it to A4 size -21 cm ). When InteractiveSize is set to 0, then all results are going to be rendered as single page and this literally kills the performance of SSRS. In cases like that, queries that can take a few seconds on your DB can take forever to render (or cause an out of memory exception unless you have tons of redundant H/W on your SSRS server).
So, in cases of queries/ SP's that execute reasonably fast on direct call and retrieve large number of rows, set InteractiveSize and you won't need to bother with other, more sophisticated solutions.
I had a similar problem: a query that returns 4,000 rows and runs in 1 second on it's own was taking so long in SSRS that it timed out.
It turned out that the issue was caused by the way SSRS was handling a multi-valued parameter. Interestingly, if the user selected multiple values, the report rendered quickly (~1 second), but if only a single value was selected, the report took several minutes to render.
Here is the original query that was taking more than 100x longer to render than it should:
SELECT ...
FROM ...
WHERE filename IN (#file);
-- #file is an SSRS multi-value parameter passed directly to the query
I suspect the issue was that SSRS was bringing in the entire source table (over 1 million rows) and then performing a client-side filter.
To fix this, I ended up passing the parameter into the query through an expression, so that I could control the filter myself. That is, in the "DataSet Properties" window, on the "Parameters" screen, I replaced the parameter value with this expression:
=JOIN(Parameters!file.Value,",")
... (I also gave the result a new name: filelist) and then I updated the query to look like this:
SELECT ...
FROM ...
WHERE ',' + #filelist + ',' LIKE '%,' + FILENAME + ',%';
-- #filelist is passed to the query as the following expression:
-- =JOIN(Parameters!file.Value,",")
I would guess that moving the query to a stored procedure would also be an effective way to alleviate the problem (because SSRS basically does the same JOIN before passing a multi-value parameter to a stored procedure). But in my case it was a little simpler to handle it all within the report.
Finally, I should note that the LIKE operator is maybe not the most efficient way to filter on a list of items, but it's certainly much simpler to code than a split-string approach, and the report now runs in about a second, so splitting the string didn't seem worth the extra effort.
Obviously getting the report running correctly (i.e. taking the same order of magnitude of time to select the data as SSMS) would be preferable but as a work around, would your report support execution snapshots (i.e. no parameters, or parameter defaults stored in the report)?
This will allow a scheduled snapshot of the data to be retrieved and stored beforehand, meaning SSRS only needs to process and render the report when the user opens it. Should reduce the wait down to a few seconds (depending on what processing the report requires. YMMV, test to see if you get a performance improvement).
Go to the report's properties tab in Report manager, select Execution, change to Render this report from a report execution snapshot, specify your schedule.
The primary solution to speeding SSRS reports is to cache the reports. If one does this (either my preloading the cache at 7:30 am for instance) or caches the reports on-hit, one will find massive gains in load speed.
Please note that I do this daily and professionally and am not simply waxing poetic on SSRS
Caching in SSRS
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms155927.aspx
Pre-loading the Cache
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms155876.aspx
If you do not like initial reports taking long and your data is static i.e. a daily general ledger or the like, meaning the data is relatively static over the day, you may increase the cache life-span.
Finally, you may also opt for business managers to instead receive these reports via email subscriptions, which will send them a point in time Excel report which they may find easier and more systematic.
You can also use parameters in SSRS to allow for easy parsing by the user and faster queries. In the query builder type IN(#SSN) under the Filter column that you wish to parameterize, you will then find it created in the parameter folder just above data sources in the upper left of your BIDS GUI.
[If you do not see the data source section in SSRS, hit CTRL+ALT+D.
See a nearly identical question here: Performance Issuses with SSRS
Few things can be done to improve the performance of the report which are as below:
1. Enable caching on the report manager and set a time period to refresh the cache.
2. Apply indexing on all the backend database tables that are used as a source in the report, although your stored procedure is already taking very less time in rendering the data but still applying indexing can further improve the performance at the backend level.
3. Use shared datasets instead of using embedded datasets in the report and apply caching on all these datasets as well.
4. If possible, set the parameters to load default values.
5. Try to reduce the data that is selected by the stored procedure, e.g. if the report contains historical data which is of no use, a filter can be added to exclude that data.
I experienced the same issue. Query ran in SQL just fine but was slow as anything in SSRS. Are you using an SSRS parameter in your dataset? I've found that if you use the report parameter directly in certain queries, there is a huge performance hit.
Instead, if you have a report parameter called #reportParam, in the dataset, simply do the following:
declare #reportParamLocal int
set #reportParamLocal = #reportParam
select * from Table A where A.field = #reportParam
It's a little strange. I don't quite know why it works but it does for me.
One quick thing you may want to look at is whether elements on your report could be slowing down the execution.
For example i have found massive execution time differences when converting between dateTimes. Do any elements on report use the CDate function? If so you may want to consider doing your formatting at the sql level.
Conversions in general can cause a massive slow down so take the time to look into your dataset and see what may be the problem.
This is a bit of a mix of the answers above, but do your best to get the data back from your stored procedure in the simplest and most finished format. I do all my sorting, grouping and filtering up on the server. The server is built for this and I just let reporting services do the pretty display work.
I had the same issue ... it was indeed the rendering time but more specifically, it was because of the SORT being in SSRS. Try moving your sort to the stored procedure and removing any SORT from the SSRS report. On 55K rows, this will improve it dramatically.
Further to #RomanBadiornyi's answer, try adding
OPTION (RECOMPILE)
to the end of your main query in the stored procedure.
This will ensure the query is recompiled for different parameters each time, in case different parameters need a different execution plan.