> A user has specifically requested to see the results of a query
> where the resulting output is 32,000 or more records. It takes more
> than 15 minutes to generate the huge HTML table that is currently
> being generated, the server is slowed down during this time, the
> potential for thread conflicts occur, etc. We also are aware that
> some versions of browsers that have severe problems attempting to
> display or print massive sized tables.
>
> An attempt was made to turn this data into html data which was
> then imported into Excel as an alternate means of display - Excel
> then reported with 'out of memory' after an hour....
>
> So what are some alternatives? Perhaps generation of an Excel
> spreadsheet directly - except does anyone know of a Solaris
> ColdFusion tag that runs efficiently and generates an Excel
> compatible spreadsheet? What are some alternatives means of
> presenting massive amounts of tabular data?
You really have two problems here.
1. How should you generate large reports?
2. What format should you use for these large reports?
Question 2 is easiest to answer, so I'll start with that one. As some other
people here have already suggested, CSV works fine for this.
Question 1 is more serious. Whenever you generate large reports with CF, you
may severely affect the performance of your server, as you've discovered.
The key to success with these tasks is to minimize the amount of work that
gets done when someone requests a report - the work done at "runtime".
There are lots of ways you can do this. You could create a scheduled task
that generates the report during off-peak hours. You could use something
other than CF, which is best used for tasks that require runtime work. For
example, you might be able to write code in the database to output your
query to a file. You could migrate this functionality to a different server,
so that it doesn't affect people using the CF server. In some cases, using
denormalized data stores such as OLAP might help. There are lots of options
here - the key, again, is to figure out which will put the least amount of
work on CF while CF is being used by others.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
voice: (202) 797-5496
fax: (202) 797-5444
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