Notification and exporting data limitations

There are many ways to export or share data from Birst. They fall into two categories:

Sending Notifications to send reports like emails

Exporting data to other applications, such as Excel

Notifications

You can create reports and schedule them for distribution by email on a regular basis. For example:

Weekly sales progress reports. (Designer reports and Visualizer reports in Dashboards 2.0.)

Alerting marketing manager when market share falls below threshold. (Designer reports only.)

Export order line item data for monthly statistical analysis for customer purchase pattern analysis. (Designer reports only.)

Exporting Data

There are various methods to export data out of Birst for use in another application.  For example:

Users can export reports to formats such as CSV, PDF, and Excel, depending on the reporting or dashboards module.

Reports with a large number of rows (up to 500,000 rows) can be exported to a text (.TXT) file by Administrators.

Birst Connect and Birst Web Services can export data as described in the following table.

Data Export Methods and Limits

Important: The export limit for any query is 10,000 records. The limit setting can be increased to 500,000 records in the space properties. This setting does not apply to Live Access queries, only to queries against the Birst user-ready data store.

Infor Appliance customers have the additional ability to directly query the database.

 

Use Case

Method

Notes

Send reports or dashboards to users on a periodic basis

Users need to be alerted when report-based data achieves a specific threshold.

Example: Progress reports, summary reports, threshold alerts.

Designer Reports (reports only): Create a report and schedule the report for distribution on a regular schedule. Reports can be distributed based on the results of a trigger report. Reports can also be sent to email addresses contained in a distribution report.

Visualizer Reports and Dashboards: In Dashboards 2.0, report authors and business users can schedule a report or dashboard for email distribution. See Business Users Guide to Dashboards 2.0 - Sharing in Email.

Designer Reports: Recommend limiting content reports to 100 rows or 1-2 pages. Make reports digestible and drive users to dashboards for deeper analysis. Include a link to a dashboard page in the email.

Export reports from dashboards

Designer Reports: Create report and export manually.

Visualizer Reports and Dashboards: In Dashboards 2.0, report authors and business users can export a report as PDF, Excel, or Excel Pivot Table, depending upon the type of report. See Business Users Guide to Dashboards 2.0 - Exporting.

Designer Reports: The recommended limit is 5,000 records.

Visualizer Reports: The limit for exporting to Excel is 50,000 rows and 15 columns. If you try to export more than 50,000 rows, Birst still exports the report but does not include data after the 50,000 rows.

If you want export a report to Excel and you want to use any Break By sections applied in the report in Excel, the export limit for the report is 50,000 cells.

The Excel Bulk Export feature allows up to 500,000 rows. This is enabled at the account level by an Account Administrator, and specified by the Manage Space > Space Properties - Maximum number of records returned by a query property.

 

Export a large data set for use in another application

Example: Need to export a report with a result set that is higher than the limit set for the space.

Use the Export Report Data page in Admin to export the result set of a report with up to 500,000 rows as a .TXT file.

Limit is 500,000 records. Up to 10 downloads can be stored.

Programmatically send data to another application, based on schedule or threshold

Example:Set of accounts that fail a specific test and need to be marked accordingly in ERP.

Web Services – to call logical query (available via WSDL)

Recommended limit is 25,000 records.

 

Bulk export a large set of data for data mining or similar external application. 

Example: Export line item order data on monthly basis to run product affinity analysis.

Bulk Export of data --Done by creating a report in Birst and then calling that report through a  Birst Connect task that runs a command file invoking the generatebulkqueryresults command.

Can be automated for scheduled runs of data statistics or similar.

Recommended limit is 200,000 records if query contains an expression.

Recommended limit is 1,000,000 records if query does not contain an expression (translates to direct physical query).