What’s the difference between Pending and Running status? What does it mean when my report gets “stuck” in one of these two statuses?

  • Pending Status: The pending status is the system’s way of telling you that it has received your report request, but is currently busy processing other requests.

The reporting environment is set up so that only a certain number of reports can run simultaneously. An Oracle product called the Concurrent Manager is employed to manage the simultaneous requests. In order to conserve system resources and to make sure that users’ requests are handled in an organized, equitable manner, the HDW team has set up a set number of reports “queues” within the Concurrent Manager.

One or more reports are associated with a particular queue. For each queue, there are a fixed number of slots. Each slot represents an opportunity to run a report simultaneously. As multiple requests for a particular report – the Detail Listing, for example - are submitted, they are assigned to one of the available slots associated with the report’s queue. As soon as a report is assigned a slot, Oracle starts to run it. Any report requests received after all its queue’s slots are filled will remain in pending status until a slot becomes available. The longer the reports in the queue take to run, the longer the waiting requests will remain in pending status.

A good analogy for this is a group of customers waiting in line for their turn at a bank teller window. Let’s say that a group of customers are waiting for only two bank tellers. Teller #1 is handling a customer who is cashing a check. In less than 2 minutes they’re on their way and the next person in line gets right to the window. Teller #2, on the other hand, has a customer who is getting a money order in foreign currency and paying for it with loose change. Teller #2 won’t be helping any other customers for a while. The Teller #2 customer is equivalent to a “long-running” report. Too many customers like that and the queue of customers waiting for the next available teller begins to wind out the door and around the corner!

Again, you can avoid the crowds by doing your banking – er, reporting! – at night. While Harvard sleeps, the reports you’ve scheduled to run overnight chug along to completion and are waiting for you when you come in in the morning.

  • Running Status: The running status indicates that your report request has been received by the Concurrent Manager (see above), assigned an open slot in the queue, and is querying the data, applying security and formatting it for review. Running times for reports can vary based on a couple of factors:

    • The number of reports competing for the same data – Just like your PC, the servers which host the reporting applications have constraints around how many simultaneous processes they can handle at a time. Unlike your PC, though, HDW’s servers are extremely powerful machines with loads of memory and high clock speeds. But even the Charles Atlas of servers could only go after the same tables of data a finite number of times. When multiple Detail Listings go after data in the journal lines table, contention arises between them and the length of time it takes the server to process all of them degrades.

    • The sheer volume of data – Many of the reports run at year-end are summarizing data for the entire fiscal year. As the number of transactions and periods increases, the servers have to work harder and longer to compile all the data; therefore, the same report run for a single period at the beginning of the FY will often take longer when it is run for 12 periods at year-end.

    • Parameters that are too broad – Certain broad parameters (ALL for every segment for example) can cause the system to have to go out to the system for large quantities of data, only to have to filter those results against a user’s security before the output is displayed. The effort to filter this data takes longer than it would have just to return and filter the smaller data set.

Check out our Reporting Performance During Year-End content for more ways you can reduce your wait times for reports.