Fast Report Studio Reports with Prompts

[bvacha]

I have a Report Studio Report that has 3 prompts and uses a relational data source.  This report is being used as a dashboard, so I'm wondering what my options are to make this report lightening fast as a user switches between prompts.

Here are options that I can come up with my concerns:

1. Convert to Active Report.  Concerns - On our network, I've found that sometimes the report causes the browser to throw an error stating that a javascript process is running too slow.  This has been due at least to some visualization charts.  I would imagine, though, that I can avoid the offending charts.  Other concerns I have are that once I move to creating the dashboard as an Active Report, I will be forced to a single Framework Manager model.

2. Switch the Framework Manager Models to Dynamic Query Mode.  Concerns - I haven't tried this yet so I'm concerned that this may involve learning and testing that I don't have time for.  I imagine that some of the testing will require me to make sure that our Cognos environment has enough RAM to support DQM.  I'm not sure how much of a risk this is.

3. Create multiple view of the reports for each prompt combination and schedule periodic caching of the reports.  Concerns - This sounds like a maintenance nightmare, not to mention that since some of the prompts are dynamically populated, I'm not sure if it's doable.

What other options may I have?  Users have already suggested that perhaps something like Tableau would be better.

Thanks in advance,
Brian

[bdbits]

This is very dependent on your data source, database schema, the report queries, nature of the prompts, the report contents, result set sizes, etc.

Conversion to Active Reports or multiple reports is at best a workaround and not really a solution. If the combinations of data are numerous, it could result in a very large Active Report file as well, which has its own performance implications. DQM, or cubes, may help performance. it depends on the data source. You could also look into creating aggregate tables or materialized/indexed views.

Using another tool like Tableau is not necessarily going to help.

It all kind of depends on information we do not have here.

[sidd_b]

U can use Javascript code to refresh the values instead of Auto Submit this will improve the report performance significantly ..

[MFGF]

U can use Javascript code to refresh the values instead of Auto Submit this will improve the report performance significantly ..

It will? In every situation? Even where there are 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 rows in the table generating the prompt values? In MS Access? With no indexes?

Wow! Note to self - learn Javascript.

Seriously, Bob is right. If you can provide more info on what drives the prompts, how and where the data is stored and modelled, and how your reports are currently written and performing, we may be able to advise on strategies to improve things.

Cheers!

MF.

[gosoccer]

We started using Cognos cube based technology and it is much faster but there are two important items that you need to worry about.
1) Cube refresh. If you are dealing with a big chunks of data, refreshing (regenerating the cube) can be very timely. We do it only once a week so the data is always at the most a week old.

2) Learning dimensional modeling programming which is very different than Relational.

Have fun!!