When working with a very large dataset of Accounts, e.g., 10's of millions of records, I wanted to create a report to return a subsets of records, i.e., records filtered by country.
I created a report A: on Accounts as follows (Country is an indexed field): Filter Criteria: Country = XX Created date = All Time Show: All Accounts No Division filter. Report columns: Account ID, OwnerID Result: took 10 secs to run and returned 200K records.
Report B: Filter Criteria: Country = YY Created date = All Time Show: All Accounts No Division filter. Report columns: Account ID, OwnerID Result: Report timed out (although it is known that there are 5 million records for this country in the table)
Report C: Filter Criteria: Country = ZZ Created date = All Time Show: All Accounts No Division filter. Report columns: Account ID, OwnerID Result: Report timed out (although it is known that there are 2 million records for this country in the table)
Proposition: Reporting run times are logarythmically proportional to the number of records being returned BUT NOT proportional to the number of records being searched.
Is this a Best Practice?: Create reports that create the smallest set of records to be returned as possible (sounds obvious but requires a little bit of skill, knowing the indexed field to use that filters in (not out) the least records).
Additional Question: Is there a practical limit to the number of record being collated for returning in the report?
