Report Data Source Options
Effective immediately, you now have 3 new options to choose from when running reports. You can run the report against:
- Production data. This will give data from the production databases which has up to 3 years worth of current information. This option will give you the most recent, up to the minute data. It can also have significant performance issues if you are running a large report, so we ask that you use this option sparingly.
- Backup data. This is the default selection. Every night, we take a snap shot of the data and place it on our backup servers. If you run the report from the "backup" data, it will not include any changes since midnight. In many cases, this is the option that will provide you with the information you need and it DOES NOT impact the production servers.
- Archive data. We only keep 3 years worth of transactional data on the production system. If you need access to historical load/invoice/settlement data more than 3 years old, then this would be your choice when running the report.
Why did we do this? We have found that some users run long, computer intensive reports during prime business hours that can have a significant effect on the performance of our servers. By offloading many of these reports to the backup servers, we can keep more production server cycles to service daily transactional needs (like booking orders, updating orders, billing and settlements).
What can you do to help? We ask that users be aware of where they need to get their data from when running reports. Please do not run your reports against the production data source unless you need "up to the minute" information.
What about scheduled reports? The first two "data source" options are available for scheduled reports. If you are scheduling reports to run automatically, please ensure to use the "backup" data source as much as possible.
Here is a snap shot of the new screen to run reports.
Here is a snap shot of the new screen to schedule reports.
