Report Builder File Limitations

0 2 Edited Nov 3, 2016 by

Anonymous

What are the factors affecting RB performance? Is it number of records, number of variables, stat testing, what else? What are the file/file size limitations we should always be mindful of when working with RB?

Comments

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robsmith Nov 3, 2016

There are a few things to consider:

If there are string variables in the datafile, it takes RB much longer to iterate through the dataset. The SPSS file format has a horrible way of storing strings.
The hard drive speed is usually the bottleneck, so placing the file on a network drive will kill performance. Putting the file even temporarily on the local hard drive is recommended.
The number of variables and records affect speed of computations – the larger the file, the longer it takes RB to iterate through it.
There’s theoretically no limit to file size.
It’s usually more efficient to create multiple smaller tables. Larger tables require more RAM to process and could take longer than breaking it out.

0

robsmith Nov 3, 2016

Performance tips:
Version 1.3 supports a new feature which allows loading the entire dataset into RAM.

Prior to version 1.3, it's often useful to create a subset file. Work with the subset file, then once you're ready to export the entire report, you just switch over to the full file. It saves a lot of processing time during the report creation stage.

And here's the official spot for performance tips.