Alternative to summarizing reports?

[ohwolf]

Hello...

I have a database that is approaching 350,000 records. Once a month, I need to generate bills to my clients. Some of these clients bills can contain up to 2,000 records.

The problem I have is the time involved in waiting for my summary report, sorted by company name, to summarize the monthly totals for all companies!

I have heard there is another method to this madness that greatly reduces the time for summarizing and subsequently printing the report??

Did I hear correctly and can someone pass on this wisdom to me....

Thanks!

[Kurt Knippel]

I am not sure if this is what you are looking for but I found that by EXPORTING the summaries into a clone of the original file you can greatly increase the speed.

I used a clone of the original file so that I had all the same fields and layouts, no need to recreate them.

I found that summary reports that used to take 3+ hours to run, could be exported/imported in minutes and took only minutes to actually generate and print.

For instance lets say that you are summarizing Sales by Area then Territory then Region and finally Total. You have 350,000 individual sales across 1,000 Areas. Export the summaries for the areas, now you only have 1000 records that you need to deal with and your reports will come out EXACTLY the same.

Hope this helps!