What happens to the report if the underlying stored procedure to execute the report take atleast 3 hrs to run

Question

Hi,
I have a report which is calling a stored procedure..
Stored procedure exceutes 4-5 stored procedure and then returns the count each procedure it ran using union all statement... The stored procedure takes around 3-4 hrs to run because it is looking at quarterly data and YTD data.
So once the report is kicked off and the procedure behind it runs and runs how will communicate to the report to show the final data... the final data will just be 5 rows with counts.
I think we are running into a issue where the stored procedure runs and runs and then the report goes into la la land and has no clue what to do...
Can you please shed some light on this..
Thanks
Karen

Answer 1

Hi Karen,
When we render a report, the report would process the following procedures:
Open connections to data source and reading data rows from data extensions for all datasets, means retrieve data. Then process the engine requests, including the tablix, grouping, sorting, filtering, aggregations and subreport processing, means process report.
Finally, render the report, including the pagination modules and on-demand expression evaluations.
So the report rending has to wait until the stored procedure is executed. To improve the performance, we can consider the three aspects:
Improve the performance of the stored procedures. Such as index and join. For better support, I suggest you can post a new thread about this issue in Transact-SQL forum at:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/home?forum=transactsql. It is appropriate and more experts will assist you.
Simplify the report. For example, avoid including a reference to [&TotalPages] or any complex expressions in the page header and page footer. For more details, please see the following document:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb522806(v=sql.105).aspx
Using cashing if you have a long-running query that cannot be tuned further. For more details, please refer to the following article:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159241(v=sql.110).aspx
Hope this helps.
Thanks,
Katherine Xiong
Katherine Xiong
TechNet Community Support