the reason for our production reporting issues were MANY

1) lack of proper indexes

2) poorly written sprocs

3) way too many joins

4) too much logic in the report sprocs

5) poorly designed DB

6) blocking

7) IO subsystem not configured correctly

8) Huge use of User defined functions in the reports forcing non-set based queries

9) Reports were using dynamica sql to create the correct sorting and grouping options

10) etc etc etc

not only have we moved the reports into their own little world to shield the OLTP system from their potential damage, we have also greatly optimized all the reports and we have way more indexes in the Reporting DBs.

Furthermore, our ETL Jobs pre-calculate many of the aggregated values and the Reporting DB is denormalized to a great extent.

it's a complete redesign literally apples to oranges

GAJ