Drivers for the reporting solution pattern include:

• Lots of intensive data processing is required to create useful reports, but such processing slows down the live system.
• Reporting tends to be historical and/or predictive. In either case, the data does not need to be completely up-to-the-minute.
• Users of the reporting mechanisms are internal to the organization, while the main application is focused on delivering information to external users.
• Users of the reporting mechanisms are inside the internal firewall. Providing access to specific parts of the external system will require a more complex firewall configuration.
• If a report is generated from live system data, all of the updates from a (long running) business transaction may not have been applied when the report is generated, potentially giving misleading results.
• Ad hoc reports generated in real-time may be required against the data.
• For a simple system, it would be possible to minimize such contention by running reports 'overnight', that is, at a time of low system load. For systems that are used 24×7, there may be no ideal timeslot at which user load is sufficiently low that running a big report would not impact system responsiveness.