Some Final Words: Response Time and Inheritance

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This chapter presents a number of alternatives to control access by groups or individual users to different resources. While it is important to understand your organizational structure before defining users in Supervisor, trying to replicate a complex structure in Supervisor will negatively affect response time. As well, the more you use the Supervisor functionality, the more complex, and larger, your security repository tables, and the harder for you to determine what is actually happening. With all of these settings, you must consider the impact on response time as well as the net effect on user functionality and data access.

Response Time Effects

Each time you include a user in a group, Supervisor creates an additional row in the security tables. In looking back at Table 12-1, note that Plastics Express has five departments. Al Saraisky is defined at the main level and then added to each of the five departments. This creates six rows of data in the repository database. Supervisors of very large organizations with many groups need to be cognizant of this. However, even in very large organizations, membership to multiple groups does not have a strong impact on response time; long branches with sub groups and enabling/disabling does! For example, let’s take a large global organization:

Number of users 20,000
Number of business units 15
Number of functional departments 10

Of course, it makes no sense for every user to belong to every business unit or functional department, but if they do (perhaps due to constant reorganizations and never cleaning up security definitions) the largest our table would be is 20,000×15×10 + 20,000 (if users were initially created at the corporate level) = 3 million rows. This is not a relatively large table. However, by default, BusinessObjects includes only minimal indexes on the repository tables. Minimal indexes allow for faster updates and password changes but result in potentially slower login times with complex security rights. Integra Solutions, a consulting firm specializing in BusinessObjects, has some guidelines for indexes to improve login times (www.integrasolutions.net). These guidelines are not officially supported by the vendor, but Integra claims to have seen a 50–70 percent improvement in login time when these indexes are used.

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