Setting Targets and Identifying Problem Areas

Many people would consider report performance as the most critical area to focus on when trying to improve the speed of an analytics solution. This is largely true, because it is the most visible part of the system used by pretty much every class of user, from administrators to business executives. However, you will learn that there are other areas of the solution that should be considered if performance is to be managed comprehensively. For example, achieving good performance in the reporting layer might be of no consequence if the underlying dataset that powers the report takes a long time to be refreshed or is susceptible to failures due to resource limits or system limits being reached. In this case, users may have great-looking, fast reports that do not provide value because the data is stale.

The authors of this book have experienced the effects of poor report performance firsthand but have also enjoyed the fruits of improving...