Do you have a Time Sheets report or portlet performance challenge due to the Time Sheets tables size in the schema and have impact to the time sheet reports performance? Here is a quick product feature/report that can help you.

There are many enterprise organizations who have been using Time Management module for many years for a large number of the business users. Over the period the time sheet data have grown rapidly in the underline core tables especially if the Time sheet policy allows to save time sheets with empty lines as shown in the following two available time sheet policy options:

(a) Allow the resource to submit a Time Sheet containing empty lines, with no warning.

(b) Allow the resource to submit a Time Sheet containing empty lines, but show a warning upon submission and provide an option for the Resources to make further updates to the Time sheet before submitting it.

An empty time sheet lines is defined as a line in which no actual effort has been entered. This does not mean a time sheet that has a total effort of 0 because user is allowed to enter negative time as effort as well. Usually while submitting a weekly/bi-weekly time sheet, business user copy past time sheet or a master time sheet template with all possible time sheet lines and modify only relevant tasks with the actual efforts for that time period. Since the time sheet policy allows empty time sheet lines submitted, time sheet gets submitted with many old/non-relevant time sheet lines tasks no actual efforts as well.  With this practice, the time sheet data grows very fast with unwanted empty lines in the time sheet tables. These empty lines can be purged using following out-of-box report which can help resolving performance issues:

There are two modes for this report to be selected using report parameter “Report Only (Yes/No)” – If the option “Yes” is chosen, it runs the report in the “preview” mode and only displays the result count but does not actually truncates the records from the tables where if “No” option is selected, it actually truncates safely only the empty time sheet lines for the specified period from the underline time sheet tables. Attached is a sample report output:

As always, before executing this report, get a required approval from the business, validate this report on non-production environments and then perform the purging on the production environment to see the boost in the performance!

Happy purging!