By using parallel report executions, Mail & Deploy automatically process a large number of reports in parallel, delivering them much faster. This concept is pretty simple and helps to make the reporting process even easier and more effective.
It is #Feature Friday!
In today’s competitive and dynamic digital world, the company’s decision-makers want to have up-to-the-minute reports delivered as fast as possible without compromising on the quality.
Reporting involves a number of repetitive tasks that not only take up valuable time but can also exhaust morale. By implementing standardization, setting up automation and using an intelligent reporting system like Mail & Deploy you take care of the mundane, repetitive actions and ensure that your Qlik®-users are empowered to put their time to the best use.
Automation is playing a pivotal role in making the entire report execution faster and reliable.
Even Mail & Deploy wants to make sure that your reporting process is as smooth as possible, that is why our software has various features to automate the routine tasks and help your team utilize their time better and craft the perfect reports for your decision-makers.
Let us suppose, you have a Qlik Sense App that contains 4 Sales Regions: North, East, South and West. Each sales region has sales representatives assigned and you want to create one report for each sales representative for each region. In this case, you could create a task that cycles through all sales representatives, create a report document and distributes it. However, this means, that these report documents will be created sequentially, which could take a rather long time.
That is why, Mail & Deploy is using another feature we are covering today:
Parallel Report Execution
Parallel execution is an interesting area which requires comparatively less effort to set up and maintain. The concept is pretty simple.
To better understand it, imagine we are currently running 10 report tasks sequentially, where each report takes exactly 1 minute to execute. Hence the total execution time is 10 minutes in sequential execution mode. With parallel execution, we can run all 10 reports in parallel. Hence the total execution time is 1 minute. In this example, we can see a drastic reduction of 90% in the total execution time. This means that we can generate a larger number of reports and distribute them 90% faster than in a sequential run. That is easy and effective.
Thus, if you enable parallelization for that aforementioned reporting situation with 4 Sales regions it would work like this:
Step 1
You can specify the maximum number of jobs to use; if we set this number to be 2, the task will be split into two jobs. In the list of parallelization values, you can then supply expressions which will be assigned to each job.
Step 2
We can add our sales regions here: North, East, South, and West, so we have 4 parallelization values. When Mail & Deploy executes the task, it will assign these 4 values to the 2 jobs into which the task will be split; job number 1 will get North and East, job number 2 will get South and West.
Step 3
In the action list of the task, you can then filter the sales region field of your Qlik Sense app to the values of the parallelization parameter by filtering to a dynamic value in an expression.
Step 4
After that filter action, you can just as you would without parallelization add your cycle that cycles through all currently applicable sales representatives, create a report document and distributes it.
For detailed information, please refer to our Mail & Deploy Knowledge Base.
By using parallel report executions, Mail & Deploy automatically process a large number of reports in parallel, delivering them much faster. This concept is pretty simple and helps to make the reporting process even easier and more effective.
Parallel execution is definitely worth trying out. If parallel execution is done correctly, parallel report execution can drastically reduce the execution time and thus facilitate faster report generation with good quality. But before jumping on to it, we suggest to first analyze the current reporting scenario, do research on the existing reports and its parallel execution practicality and measure the benefits of the parallelization. If it is worth the hassle, you should surely go for it!
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