Best Practices for Scheduling Jobs and Administrative Tasks

MicroStrategy recommends the following best practices when scheduling jobs and administrative tasks:

• Executing simultaneous reports can strain system resources. If you have many reports or tasks that need to be executed on the same time-based schedule, consider creating several similar schedules that trigger 15 minutes apart. For example, one schedule triggers at 8 AM every Monday, and another triggers at 8:15 AM.
• To prevent users from scheduling many simultaneous reports, you can prevent users from scheduling jobs using a schedule by editing the schedule's Access Control List (ACL). To do this, in the Schedule Manager, right-click the schedule and select Properties, then select the Security tab in the Properties dialog box, and make sure that only users who can use the schedule have Modify or Full Control access to the schedule. For more information about ACLs, see Controlling Access to Objects: Permissions.
• Establish reasonable limits on how many scheduled jobs are allowed. For details on this setting, see Limit the Total Number of Jobs.
• If you need to create multiple similar subscriptions, you can create them all at once with the Subscription Wizard. For example, you can subscribe users to several reports at the same time.
• If you need to temporarily disable a schedule, you can set its start date for some time in the future. The schedule does not trigger any deliveries until its scheduled start date.
• In a clustered system, if it is important which node an administrative task is executed on, use an event-triggered schedule and trigger the event on that node.
• If many subscriptions are listed in the Subscription Manager, you can filter the list of subscriptions so that you see the relevant subscriptions.
• When selecting reports to be subscribed to, make sure all the reports with prompts that require an answer actually have a default answer. If a report has a prompt that requires an answer but has no default answer, the subscription cannot run the report successfully because the prompt cannot be resolved, and the subscription is automatically invalidated and removed from the system.
• When a scheduled report or document finishes executing, a message can display in the subscribed user's History List alerting them that the report is ready to be viewed. The user then opens the message to retrieve the results. If the request was not completed successfully, the user can view details of the error message. These messages are available in the History List folder. For more information about History Lists, see Saving Report Results: History List.
• You can track the successful delivery of a subscribed report or document. In the Subscription Editor or Subscription Wizard, select the Send notification to email address check box and specify the email address. A notification email is sent to the selected address when the subscribed report or document is successfully delivered to the recipients.
• You can track the failed delivery of subscribed reports or documents. In the Project Configuration Editor, in the Deliveries: Email notification category, enable the administrator notification settings for failed deliveries.
• For best performance, consider configuring the following settings to suit your subscription needs:
  • Tune the Number of scheduled jobs governing setting according to the size of your hardware. Larger hardware can handle higher settings.
  • Enable caching.
  • If your database and database machine allow a larger number of warehouse connections, increasing this number can improve performance by allowing more jobs to execute against the warehouse.
  • Increase the Scheduler session timeout setting.

    Exercise caution when changing settings from the default. For details on each setting, see the appropriate section of this manual.

• To control memory usage, consider configuring the following settings:
  • Limit the number of scheduled jobs per project and per Intelligence Server.
  • Increase the User session idle time.
  • Enable caching.
• If you are using Distribution Services, see Best Practices for Using Distribution Services.