Report Bursting-Single Pass Technique

[Former Member]

Report bursting is a technique which is used to send single report to list of users wherein they can view data which is relevant only to them. Firstly, the report gets refreshed and then it is send through email to the list of users in either PDF or excel format. When the report is refreshed, it hits the database for a single time, which is termed as single pass report bursting.  The process of customizing the data in report so that individual users can view data which is relevant only to them is termed as personalization.

Normally personalization is achieved based on distinguishing field such as “SKU number” or any such BO dimension object which hold unique values for individual users. Usually two BO reports are required. The first BO report called "Source Report", just a name for our reference, will be the source document which will be distributed to the users.  The data source (also called data provider) should be using the distinguishing field “SKU number” along with other BO dimension and measure objects.

The second BO report called “Dynamic List Report” will be used as source for dynamic recipients. This report should typically have “SKU number” and "Email Id".

A publication in BO is created, lets call it as “Pub” which uses the first and second BO reports.  The first BO report will be selected as source document in the publication. And the second BO report will be selected as the dynamic recipient. When the publication runs or is scheduled to run. Then  “SKU number” is fetched from first BO report and an email id "Email Id" is picked up corresponding to each  “SKU number” from the second BO report. Once the report gets refreshed, it is chopped based on the “SKU number” and only relevant (or authorize) part of the data is send to users whose email id belongs to that particular “SKU number”. When no data is available for few “SKU number” in the refreshed BO report, then PDF or excel version of BO report goes out to users as blank files.

If users would have accessed reports by login in to Business Objects Enterprise then they would hit the database several times. The first hit to CMS database would have happened when they would have logged into Infoview (web based portal of Business Objects). The second hit to reporting database would have happened when they would have refreshed the report.  Also needless to say,  other kind of restrictions would have to be applied in order to enable users to view data which is only relevant to them (or which they are authorized to view). More over when there are lot of users, then refreshing their individual reports will create a lot of load on the reporting databases.

Thus single pass report bursting reduces the unwanted load on the databases. All users won’t have to be added to Business Objects Enterprise. So the number of BO licenses required, for named user, also gets reduced. The publication can be scheduled to run during non peak hours when network traffic  is low thereby utilizing the network bandwidth in an efficient way.