3025688 - Guardrails for Story Reports

• Unable to add more than 120 columns or 30 tables in the query designer
• Differences in column/table limits between Preview and Production environments
• Story widgets display the following error:
  "The processing in the backend was stopped because of a too high data volume involved in the intermediate calculations."

Image/data in this KBA is from SAP internal systems, sample data, or demo systems. Any resemblance to real data is purely coincidental.

SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite

1. Create a new Story report
2. Begin building the data source (query)
3. Attempt to add more than 30 tables or 120 columns
4. Receive a message: "The maximum number of columns you can include in your selection is 120."
   

Story query designer has a guardrail in place. This guardrail is documented in the Story reports Guide: Adding Queries for a Story:

"Currently, your query can include only up to 120 columns, which are selected from maximum 30 tables. Your query can retrieve data up to 1,000,000 cells."

Limits:

• 120 columns
• 30 tables
• 1 Million Cells

This is standard across instances per query/data source to prevent intensive use of resources which may affect performance on both server and client side.

Use Cases not fit for Story reports

• Dumping data to CSV or Excel for Excel only analysis
• Intermediate step for ingestion into other systems
• Data needs to process
  
  • More than a million cells or
  • More than 120 columns
  • More than 30 Tables
• Data Warehousing (ETL) use case instead of Reporting Use Case
• Short Term: Autojoins and Table Joins not exceeding 30 for a story (short term limitation, to be removed after fix in place) (Refer Out of memory KBA)
  
  • As part of Report designing, report creators are requested to count number of joins and autojoins expected before creating the report. In case it crosses 30, customer might face Out of memory.

For some of these use cases, CPI, Integration Center, Workforce analytics and ORD may be better suited. Please get in touch with a SF Partner for same.

For best practices and to avoid performance issues, kindly follow the Guidelines mentioned in 

• Best Practices for designing a Story 
• Section 6 of Implementation Design Principles 

If you notice that any of your instances are not following the above said limits, please file a case with LOD-SF-ANA-SAC component.

• Activating Stories in SAP SuccessFactors - SAP Community
• Implementation Design Principles for Story Reports
• Enablement Configuration for Story Reports

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