BIRT Exchange Forum: BIRT Exchange Forum -> BIRT Rocks!

A typical report generation cycle involves fetching data from the data source, perform sorting, filtering and grouping based on report design logic before the report is rendered. This data processing can be quite resource intensive and for a large data sets might take a long time causing delays in making report available for viewing.
Actuate BIRT Viewer solves this issue by pushing down data operations to the database layer and starts rendering the report pages while is data is still being fetched. This feature is called Progressive Viewing and allows you to view first and consecutive pages while the report is still being rendered as opposed to waiting for all pages to be generated before a page can be viewed. In the latest release (11 sp2) this feature has been enhanced to decrease response time even further by allowing report design to specify if the data is already sorted. (See Video)

A value of false means that BIRT engine will use the sort order of the incoming data and will not attempt to re-sort based on the group keys defined for the table. This helps minimize data processing and results in faster report generation.
The enhanced Progressive Viewing feature works with all out-of-box Actuate BIRT data source types as well as custom data source types based on the ODA (Open Data Framework)

Download your free evaluation version of BIRT iServer and give it a try.