Historical Report Instance Management

[JohnClark]

How do you manage the number and amount of historical report instances in your Production environments?

The management of historical instances can have a significant impact on various performance factors of an environment.

Business Objects (SAP) Support has told me that they have an internal recommendation that we have no more than 50,000 objects in our repository. Since this includes, servers, users, and all other objects in your system, this seems like a very impractically low number. There is no documentation available for this recommendation.

The default value for the number of objects that will be cached for the Central Management Server (CMS) is 100,000. There are documented instructions on how to increasea this for better performance SAP KBA 1981894 - "Number of Objects in CMS System Cache" Metric

We have close to a million objects in our repository. While this doesn't appear to have any measurable impact on day to day performance, it does have a significant impact on running the Repository Diagnostic Tool (a few minutes in our non-production environments versus over six hours for our Production environment).

I know we can set limits (we have these set fairly low in our non-production systems), but in our Production system there has been a longer retention period set.

How do other companies manage the historical report instances in their systems? It seems to be something that can get out of hand rather quickly.

[DellSC]

I agree - 50,000 objects seems very low - especially for large systems with many users and reports.

When working with my clients, I usually recommend the following:

1. Don't let users schedule from their favorites. If an essential report that many people receive is scheduled from a favorite and the user who "own" the favorite leaves the company, the schedule is lost. If you must let them schedule from favorites, limit the instances to no more than 15 day and if they need a report to be kept for longer it must go to a public folder.

2. For reports where history is not required for regulatory reasons, I usually recommend the following limits:

- Daily Reports: anywhere form 7 to 35 days depending on the purpose of the report.

- Weekly Reports: 6 to 12 weeks.

- Monthly Reports: 12 to 18 months.

3. For reports where history is required for regulatory reasons, such as the 7-year requirement for certain financial reporting, you can certainly keep it in the system. However, there are several third-party report archiving solutions available (APOS has one) that can be used to remove these from the active reports in your system while still allowing access to them if needed. Another option is to write an application to archive them yourself using one of the SDKs. I have successfully done this for a previous employer. However, reports that are stored as native Webi need to be exported to Excel or PDF format when you do this.

-Dell