Optimizing Reports - Show the Right Set of Data

You are probably now thinking, of course my report shows the right data!

Ok, but is it fast (enough)?

My esteemed colleague Dean Kalanquin started blogging recently. He has been working in databases for a long time, and has gained great experience and knowledge by working on several different areas of SQL Server before joining the Reporting Services team a few years ago. Among our common interests are certainly performance and scalability. While Dean and I typically approach these areas in similar ways, Dean tends to focus more on the database side of things, and I leverage my knowledge about the internals of the report processing engine to look at it also from a report design and data processing point of view. Together, we regularly figure out great ways to effectively optimize systems and reports.

In his first technical blog post titled "Pet Peeve: Slow Reports", Dean provides tips on how to optimize reports by applying pre-aggregation already in the database query and only returning data you really want to show upfront. Further detail data can then be provided as drillthrough reports that only retrieve a specific subset of the original data, or you could apply a combination of drill-down + drillthrough, as discussed in a recent posting.

I think Dean is going to be doing a whole series on various report design and optimization "gotchas", so his blog is definitely worth keeping an eye on.