This is the second in a series of articles that will discuss the factors that control the response times of your PMF reports. Database tuning is a well researched field and there is a wide range of publicly available material, so in these discussions I will be assuming that you, the reader, understand the basics of database technology. If you encounter a term that is unfamiliar, a quick web search will provide an explanation.

What databases does PMF currently support?
As of PMF 5.2.2, which will be out shortly, we will work with all releases of SQL Server, Oracle, DB2/UDB, and DB2 for z/OS that are currently supported by Information Builder's underlying WebFOCUS product. If you need to work with a significantly older version of a particular database - for example Oracle 6 - or if you want to use a brand new database version that has just been released, please contact IBI help first. And, while we cannot guarantee it, support for MySQL is on our short list of things to do in the near term future.

What should my report response times be??
When we do our internal testing, we expect that any individual report should return results to your browser in under 5 seconds. When you are displaying a Dashboard that is running many individual reports, you may see slightly longer response times. We have done internal testing with up to 8 Million rows of data and are seeing response times of 2-3 seconds.

How do you do your internal testing??
All our internal timing tests are currently done using Windows XP on a Dell Latitude laptop running at roughly 2 GHz with 3.25 GB available RAM. I have done some fairly extensive testing on SQL Server and Oracle, and some limited testing of DB2/UDB. By running everything on one isolated machine, we can cleanly separate out database issues from network and multi-user access problems.

What's next?
In the next article, I will get into some more details of tuning and discuss some differences between the different databases.


As always, feel free to ask questions or add your own observations.

EricH