SLOOOWWW queries

Jennifer Reager

Has anyone else noticed that when using any "First Gift" criteria, it takes 20-30 minutes to complete? I have to set aside half a day (sometimes quite literally) to work on any sort of acquisition reporting. Even complex queries and those using Summary Information run in seconds.



Is it just me? 

John Heizer

I don't have that issue here.  Not sure what might cause it.

Jennifer Reager

John Heizer:

I don't have that issue here.  Not sure what might cause it.

Okay, well this is strange. I'm working on a large metrics project, and the more recent the "First Gift" dates in the criteria, the slower it is. I waited nearly 45 minutes for a query earlier today, but then, when I started working backwards, the results are immediate.



This happens frequently when I'm doing my New Donor reports for each quarterly Board meeting. . .weird. And annoying.

Debra Holcomb

I have run into the issue where it takes ten+ hours to run queries or they wouldn't run at all when they ran the day before just fine.  It depends on how many records you have in your database, how your query is written, and how many times you are 'touching' data.  To solve our problem we 1) simplified our data structure (massive project) and 2) and use REQueue to run the query, export or report. Using REQueue does two things for me, it doesn't use the user interface we access so it runs more quickly and it runs things in the background so I can continue my regular work without being locked out of RE.  

Craig Mulder

Over the past 3+ months, I've had occasions where
queries using the "One Of" operator have been very slow - similar
to your experience, though I haven't had the patience to wait 30
minutes.  Other times, and previously, the same queries have
been very responsive.

When there is slow down like this, I end up doing a query to
retrieve a larger set of results than I want, using the Export
module to identify the data I want to remove, and then massaging
the results in Excel. All-in-all, a significant waste of time and
an opportunity for errors.

Craig

Rachel Slager 2

There can be all kinds of reasons for things like this, but one idea is to start at the beginning and ask your IT staff if

1. backup is being performed daily

2. If they are running the Blackbaud Management Console tools to improve database performance.

3. Are they experiencing other issues related to internet connection speeds, because this definitely impacts RE run speeds.



Even with tons of records in the database, if the query results should be a small group  then the query shouldn't take that long to run.  Unless you have a ton of output fields.  If you don't already, run the query without any output fields as any output will make queries run more slowly.