Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online has a number of capabilities that allow customers to surface business data that helps them drive decisions and interact with their customers more effectively.

Capabilities that are available within CRM Online include:

  • views
  • charts
  • dashboards
  • Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services reports
  • Microsoft Office Excel integration that allows users to easily build self-service reports by using the Power BI features PowerView, PowerPivot, and PowerQuery

As the volume of data held within the CRM Online database continues to grow it becomes more important than ever to think about your BI strategy and determine the most effective mechanisms for reporting and visualizing large datasets.

In a CRM Online environment, the reporting infrastructure is shared and separate from the database. In this architecture, although customers share the resources required to run the report, each report runs against the customers’ individual database instance. Additionally, with CRM Online, users can run as many reports as they need whenever they want to run them to meet business goals. We do not place time restrictions on reports.

The reporting capabilities built in to CRM Online are designed to let users run reports on datasets that span shorter periods of time. Considering this, Microsoft Dynamics CRM has the following fixed settings:

  • Reports and queries can execute for up to five minutes. When the maximum period is reached, the report will time-out and a message is returned to the user. Within the five-minute duration, reports and queries are allowed to span large datasets that are beyond 50,000 records, which provides significant flexibility to satisfy most operational reporting needs.
  • To improve query response, we recommend that detailed reports minimize the display of large numbers of records. To do this, apply suitable filtering to reduce the number of records that are returned. When you create aggregated or summarized reports, queries should push the aggregation to the query rather than fetch detailed records to perform aggregation in the report. This can be done by using Fetch XML aggregation. More information: Use FetchXML aggregation
  • For charts and grids displayed in dashboards, Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows users to run queries that have a dataset that is under 50,000 rows. Should a user run a dashboard query that span a dataset of 50,000 or more rows, Microsoft Dynamics CRM returns the message “The maximum record limit is exceeded. Reduce the number of records.” The dataset practical setting helps to ensure optimal performance of the CRM Online application.

For more on...

  • Tips and solutions for reporting
  • Third-Party Microsoft Dynamics CRM adapters for SSIS
  • ETL tools

... please read on here

See also

  • Dynamics CRM OData Feeds and Power Query: What’s the [Record]? - link
  • Dynamics CRM 2013 and Power BI for Office 365 – Part 1 and Part 2