It allows corporate procurement officers to name other buyers and set credit limits. For a reporting-intensive site, this is a challenge, he says. Although ICS is a Microsoft shop that runs IIS, Site Server and Commerce Server, it recently abandoned Microsoft ActiveX components for communicating with the back-end databases. Using these map query objects meant repeating certain executions that slowed the generation of reports. ICS now relies on stored procedures, using SQL 7.0, for handling the reporting-intensive features.
Stored procedures are like caches for database requests.
If a report requires five steps, the stored procedure has the first three already completed. Dietrich says this change increased reporting execution speed by a factor of three to five. In essence, an e-commerce site must scale with the number of users, respond reliably and quickly, and optimize its use of bandwidth. When it comes to performance, caching, clustering and load balancing, applied at the appropriate junctures, make these three goals more attainable. Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved.