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How goed does BIRT perform?
rafavs86
We are thinking to switch from our current BI tool to BIRT, we are still on the tool analysis assesment and so far I've been liking the tool , however I'm beggining to doubt how scalabale it is in terms of performance. Our current tool can process millions of records contained in a flat file, when I tried a 300k records file on BIRT I'm having serious perfomance issue, a simple chart with some aggregation will take from 20 ro 30 seconds to load.
Can anyone share experiences on how BIRT performs under high demanding enverioments?
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rafavs86
Anyone has an input?
Yaytay
<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote' data-author="'rafavs86'" data-cid="113435" data-time="1358786197" data-date="21 January 2013 - 09:36 AM"><p>
Anyone has an input?<br /></p></blockquote>
This isn't the busiest forum, and your question is very open, so don't be too disappointed about not getting any answers.<br />
<br />
The only real way to tell whether BIRTis fast enough is to try it out for your purposes.<br />
Unfortunately there are different ways of handling the report that can have a lage effect on performance and it can take some time and effort to find the best approach to any given problem.<br />
<br />
Open source BIRT is definitely not the best performing BI tool available, for a few reasons:<br />
1. It tends to favour flexibility over performance.<br />
2. Improving performance takes time and energy and doesn't tick any boxes on product comparisons, so it gets a low priority.<br />
3. Every time you run the report it processes the date from scratch, there isn't any caching between runs.<br />
<br />
For my purposes I find it hard to produce real-world reports that are as fast as I'd like (I.e. sub-second), but often the data is a large contributor to the time and with some tweaking I can usually get it fast enough.<br />
<br />
If you are trying to time it yourself be sure to give it plenty of RAM and run the same report twice after starting the report engine before starting any timers (it des a lot of lazy startup).<br />
<br />
I think (though I may be wrong) that the Actuate products appear faster that open sourc BIRT because they can prioritise performance work and their server architecture can cache data nod metadata.<br />
<br />
Jim