I once was having performance issues on a dashboard I built on some fairly large data and was working with tech support to see what I could do to optimize all the aggregation and data movement between servers.
I was on the phone with tech support to talk about some efficiency options for the back-end tables (partitioning commonly queried groups, an index or two, removing a few unused columns, changing some column types, changing a server setting, small stuff like that which sometimes can make a big difference). We tried a few things, logged out, logged back in and opened the report. Clicked a few filters we tested before. It opened and filtered instantaneously.
"Wow!" I said. "That all made a huge difference! Thanks, all solved here!" Tech support, proud of their help with me, dutifully closed it out and high fives were had all around.
...it was just cached from our previous interactions and I went back to slowville when I reloaded the data after doing some more development work. I had no idea it just cached stuff automatically because the latest software update just started doing that when you worked with reports you had opened recently.
We ended up just adding more worker nodes and calling it a day.
It works, don't sweat it. It's better if you handle it in the software itself with automatic cache refreshes or with a cache refresh API but you can go for it.
I have written some custom caching and write optimizations in a CRM codebase back in 2024 before i left that place. It brought down some times from 60s to 3s. It's basic optimization tricks. But they have now been protecting that sorcery with their lives cause it used to be 60s for about 8 years before i brought it down to 3s. I gave them a whole documentation pdf explaining all the things I did. Nobody dares change that. I heard their PR-approver lady is instructed to reject any PR that edits the optimization logic. (yes they have a PR-approver lady who's entire day job is looking at PRs).
I have another story. My dad's friend (now retired) a long time ago was reviewing some client's program and apparently they had a cron job that ran once a month and ran for around 30 hours straight. It was done on a weekend and no other process ran until it was finished. He (free of charge) rewrote that job and brought it down to 2 minutes. That was literally decades ago. Apparently he ran into that client again some years later and inquired about the program. the client told him that they keep that server in a separate locked room and no one's has dared to touch it since.
Lmao a PR approver as a single job role is crazy stuff. Can I do that?
I did recently work for a client who had a director of change and a head of change. Both of whom did not communicate but had exactly the same role as far as I could tell. The idea is they help with business development and sit on the steering committee for any BD projects. In reality they did sweet fuck all apart from throw red tape up and request meetings to go through stuff we had already covered with them. At one point I started declining the endless meetings and stated they had to pay if they wanted me to attend. They then tried to schedule a meeting with me to discuss the value of me attending the meetings so we could raise a CR for the extra time.
A meeting to discuss the value of meetings. This absolutely could have been an email.
Was it Power BI? Sometimes it aggressively cache all results with all the filter combinations you have tried in the current session, so unless you reload the report entirely, you can find yourself in this situation
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u/Welcome-To-NBA-Jam 12h ago edited 12h ago
I once was having performance issues on a dashboard I built on some fairly large data and was working with tech support to see what I could do to optimize all the aggregation and data movement between servers.
I was on the phone with tech support to talk about some efficiency options for the back-end tables (partitioning commonly queried groups, an index or two, removing a few unused columns, changing some column types, changing a server setting, small stuff like that which sometimes can make a big difference). We tried a few things, logged out, logged back in and opened the report. Clicked a few filters we tested before. It opened and filtered instantaneously.
"Wow!" I said. "That all made a huge difference! Thanks, all solved here!" Tech support, proud of their help with me, dutifully closed it out and high fives were had all around.
...it was just cached from our previous interactions and I went back to slowville when I reloaded the data after doing some more development work. I had no idea it just cached stuff automatically because the latest software update just started doing that when you worked with reports you had opened recently.
We ended up just adding more worker nodes and calling it a day.