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Reputation: 22733

Business Objects Universe Performance with Remote Database

My company are considering using Business Objects for reporting purposes as our parent company have purchased a license.

The Scenario

Without an understanding of how Business Objects and the Universe can be setup, I can't see that running reports with data on one site and Business Objects on another would work considering the size of the database and the amount of data that would have to be queried over the wire.

I have two questions:

  1. Is the proposed scenario possible to configure?
  2. How would Business Objects perform, if at all, with data stored on a remote server?

UPDATE:

We run backups of our live database every 3 hours so we could in theory copy the database from Site A to Site B overnight or more frequently if required, but I'm still unsure of the performance impact of running reporting over the wire.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1079

Answers (3)

mohammedn
mohammedn

Reputation: 2950

In Business Objects you have three tiers (ordered as following - top to down): Report, Universe, Connection and Data Source (most of the cases I see was an ODBC driver). You define your database connection (SQL, Oracle or whatever DBMS connection) as an ODBC on Site A (application tier) and connect to the database using ODBC to the database residing in Site B.

The performance issue that may happen is not about the amount of data in the database. It actually depends on the amount of the data "queried" in your report. I believe you need to create a pilot report and try to fetch some sample comprehensive large data from your data source as a proof of concept.

We have the same architecture you mentioned applied in our company. We have several reports in Site A and fetching data from several databases in different sites/locations (however Site A and Site B are both on the same network). We are working also with several DBMSs like MySQL, Oracle and SQL Servers. Regardless that we don't have the amount of data that you mentioned, but we don't see a noticing impact on the performance when running the reports.

Upvotes: 2

Ross Patterson
Ross Patterson

Reputation: 9570

In our experience, BusinessObjects access to a database is no different from any other SQL access. The InfoView application will even show you the SQL that the report will execute. When we doubt the performance of a report, we often copy that SQL and paste it into SQL Server Management Studio and profile the query completely outside of BusinessObjects.

Upvotes: 1

Baldy
Baldy

Reputation: 3659

No specific knowledge of the business-objects products here, but regardless of reporting tool you would be best to flatten and push sets of data overnight, ready for reporting on the following day, or maybe at set points throughout the day if once a day is not enough.

Allowing users to run potentially complex and time consuming queries on live data sets can put a lot of pressure on a live system.

We experienced this on a national system, and got around the issue by running overnight jobs in SQL Server that flattened the data (essentially removing the need to join tables) and exported it to a separate server, which the reporting tool would be connected to - It's basically data warehousing.

If the business are adamant that they need 'up to the minute' data on their reports you need to raise the case of a better infrastructure to support that, and work with the business to figure out what its worth to them.

Upvotes: 1

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