[CourtneyNHS]

Hello,

Sometimes when we are trying to run big reports it slows down our system or freezes it. When we try to cancel out of a big report by hitting the cancel button why doesn't the report Stop? For example We have experienced this problem recently while trying to generate a Sales report, by item, by vendor for an 11 month period. When my boss realized it was slowing down the whole system out at the point of sale he tried to cancel out of it. The Retail edge program froze. In the task manager of the computer it showed Retail edge as "Not Responding" and we had to reboot. Why doesn't the cancel button just stop the mayhem?

Thanks Guys,
Courtney

[RetailEdge Moderator]

Courtney

A few things:

1. A sales report should not grind things to a halt. For instance I just ran an 11 month report on a fairly large dataset that generated a 500 page sales report in about 45 seconds. If the sales reports are slow it could be that the table indexes (very important for speed) could need repair. To do this you should choose Verify Tables from the Tools menu. Then on the displayed form press Ctrl-Alt R. This will display the tables. Select Sales and Sales Items. Then choose to repair them. This should be done only when no one else is trying to access the tables because when the tables are being repaired they are locked so that no one else can use them. Also on large tables this can take some time (maybe an hour or so). So do it when you have the time and after hours would be best.

2. RetailEdge should be able to cancel out of a report. However the report process can consist of many steps. There are a number of tables that might be accessed in a step wise process to build the report data. So when you press Cancel, RetailEdge may take awhile to properly stop using the particular table it is accessing. Also there can be a step where RetailEdge is building data locally after getting information from the tables. And finally there is the report building step. Each of these steps should be able to be cancelled but sometimes RetailEdge might continue its process and cancel at the beginning of the next process. If slowness occurs or you can't cancel a report, let us know what step RetailEdge is displaying and that will give us more information about what is going on.

3. Rebooting a local computer might not help your situation at all. RetailEdge is a client/server based application. What this means is that you might be running a long report which you feel is slowing things down and quit out of the program through the task manager. Since the reports are being built on the server, quitting out of the program this way may not have any effect and the query that is building the report on the server will continue to run. The key is that you need to make sure that the server it properly shut down and rebooted. This will end the task that is slowing down the system. BTW, quitting RetailEdge through the Task Manager or Ctrl-Alt-Del is not a good idea. This can damage the tables and this type of shutdown along with power outages/brownouts are the number one causes of database damage.

4. If you are experiencing slowdowns you should go to the server machine and check the task manager to see what process it taking the most CPU processing. You might find that some other process is actually the culprit and since everyone is using RetailEdge it appears that RetailEdge is causing the problem.

5. Lastly there is an SQL statement that we have used to speed up some reports. This does not seem to have that much effect on the data I am using here, however, we have seen it have a dramatic effect when databases get larger. I have included it in the sales reports you are having trouble with. This will be released with 8.1.12 (in about a week). See if this helps you, but I would try number 1 first since it sounds like you might have been doing the three fingered salute which can cause problems (Number 3).

Hello,

Sometimes when we are trying to run big reports it slows down our system or freezes it. When we try to cancel out of a big report by hitting the cancel button why doesn't the report Stop? For example We have experienced this problem recently while trying to generate a Sales report, by item, by vendor for an 11 month period. When my boss realized it was slowing down the whole system out at the point of sale he tried to cancel out of it. The Retail edge program froze. In the task manager of the computer it showed Retail edge as "Not Responding" and we had to reboot. Why doesn't the cancel button just stop the mayhem?

Thanks Guys,
Courtney

[CourtneyNHS]

Thanks Bill,

I'll give it a shot and see if it straightens us out.

CK