Ad-hoc reporting response time degrades with large crosstab views and multiple dimension filters

mohit_analyst
Sat, 28 Dec 2024 08:07:15 +0000

Our users are building ad-hoc crosstab reports in Tableau Server and experiencing severe performance degradation. When they add more than 5-6 dimension filters, response time goes from 8-10 seconds to over 2 minutes.

Typical user workflow: Start with base sales data (2M rows), add dimensions like Region, Product Category, Customer Segment, Sales Rep, then apply filters to narrow down. The crosstab might have 15-20 columns and 200-500 rows.

Sample query from logs showing 127 second execution:

SELECT region, product, customer, sales_rep, SUM(amount)
FROM sales_fact
WHERE date_key BETWEEN 20230101 AND 20231231
GROUP BY region, product, customer, sales_rep

How can we optimize this for better ad-hoc analysis performance? Context filters? Extract pre-aggregation? Something else?