PDF Reports are Enormous

by Jan 15, 2014

  • Avatar of Randy Knight
    Randy Knight

    Participant

    I have noticed that when you save a report as a PDF from within DM, on some (but not all) occasions the resulting PDF is gigantic. As an example I did a CPU Activity report for one server for one day this morning. 65MB PDF File. Saved it as Excel and it was fine.

    Anybody else experienced this?

    Avatar of Jason Crider
    Jason Crider

    Participant

    yes, we’ve experienced it and reported it. I believe they’ve filed it as an enhancement with the devs at some point.

    Some of the reports are that way and some of them aren’t? I don’t know if it’s as simple as they were developed at different times and the pdf generation is different between the two. Makes it really difficult to share it with someone on the team.

    Usually I will use cute pdf or something to print the gigantic pdf to a new pdf and it’s small and sharable then.

    #245

    Avatar of Vicky Harp
    Vicky Harp

    Keymaster

    You know, I’m struggling to remember what was going on here, so I’ll ping the dev lead and see if he remembers.

    Here’s what I do remember (hey, half remembered bits and bobs are better than nothing, right?) – we’re all used to compressed PDFs. Everyone is always using compressed PDFs for everything. The uncompressed PDFs are huge – which could explain a lot about why a smallish PDF can take an age and a ton of memory to load. But setting that aside – for some reason compressed PDFs were not an option when we were coding this up. I’m almost certain it was a third party control issue, but I can’t remember if it was the SSRS report viewer that we have embedded in DM (which would be MS redistributable code) or if it was something else. At the time when I last looked at this – probably around 2009 – it was an insurmountable issue for one reason or another, maybe licensing. That may have changed in the years since.

    Annnnndddd that’s what I remember off the top of my head. I’ll pester some folks and see if there’s any more recent info/


    ? Vicky Harp
    Idera Staff / Product Manager

    Avatar of Vicky Harp
    Vicky Harp

    Keymaster

    Could it be that it’s the reports with graphs that are huge and the ones that are just text and tables are not? Am I making that up?


    ? Vicky Harp
    Idera Staff / Product Manager

    Avatar of Jason Crider
    Jason Crider

    Participant

    some of those things ring a bell with me too:
    -third-party license

    I’ll have to dig back through emails tomorrow and see if I have anything on it.

    Avatar of Randy Knight
    Randy Knight

    Participant

    I’d expect the reports with graphs to be a little bigger but we’re talking 300MB. Not exactly something you email around. 😉

    Avatar of Vicky Harp
    Vicky Harp

    Keymaster

    Yes, I chatted with the dev lead about this yesterday and is going to take a peek at this component again and see if anything has changed since last time we looked into it.

    As a workaround, I actually think that printing to PDF creates smaller files than exporting to PDF, which is no real fix but, as you mention, it’s more likely to be of a size that can be emailed.


    ? Vicky Harp
    Idera Staff / Product Manager

    Avatar of Jason Crider
    Jason Crider

    Participant

    I was looking at some old cases and just came accross this one:
    00145118 Crider, Jason Certain reports save as a very large PDF Deferred Development 3 – Medium 5/30/2012 11:48 AM

    #499

    Avatar of Idera SQLSupport
    Idera SQLSupport

    Moderator

    Hi there!

    Randy if you don’t mind contacting Support at support@idera.com, or through the customer portal at https://idera.secure.force.com, we’d like to get a case attached to this issue, which is effectively what Jason is running into, too.

    As Vicky mentioned, Development and Product Management are going to review the issue and see if there’s a something we can do to improve the size of .pdf exports.

    I’ll also make some notation so that we can update this thread if/when a change like that is added into a release.

    Thanks!


    ? Regards,

    Idera Technical Support – SQL Products

    Avatar of Wayne Butler
    Wayne Butler

    Participant

    Hello,

    Sorry to bump a nearly year-old topic but was wondering if any progress has been made toward fixing this issue. We just converted to DM from another tool in January. We have run into this issue when trying to show off our new tool. Excel gets the job done but a PDF would be better. Any chance this is fixed in 9.0?

    Thanks

    Avatar of Idera SQLSupport
    Idera SQLSupport

    Moderator

    Just wanted to confirm that the behavior has not changed in SQLdm 9.0, but we’ll post an update when there is a change that improves this.


    ? Regards,

    Idera Technical Support – SQL Products

    Avatar of Mike Lawell
    Mike Lawell

    Participant

    Has this improved, the pdf reports still appear to be huge. Too big to email.