April 11, 2011

FINANCIAL DETAIL: The Need For Speed

Running m-Fin reports in production over the weekend to make sure m-Fin 1.5 arrived intact, I noticed that the new m-Fin FINANCIAL DETAIL is slower than the previous version. The cause is additional processing overhead supporting the new FOPPS WITH NO ACTIVITY prompt. It’s on the second prompt page. This feature renders a report output page with fopps header information even if there are no transactions found for the desired accounts. While this is a nice usability touch, I don’t think it is worth slowing the report down.  Results vary but runs are generally 10 seconds longer.  It doesn’t matter which option you select in this prompt, the processing overhead is always there.  So available now in the Cognos QA environment is a faster m-Fin FINANCIAL DETAIL with this feature removed.

with_no_activity_prompt

I don’t want the slow version of this report lingering in production. We’ll migrate the improved version to production in just a day or two unless problems are found in testing or I hear that the FOPPS WITH NO ACTIVITY prompt is more important than speed.  Any m-Fin user can test.  Simply go to the Cognos QA environment and run m-Fin FINANCIAL DETAIL.  Leave comments on this page if you want to have a voice in this decision.