[Best practice] Heavy background tasks?

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
This is a hugely broad question.

The general response is to have a separate OLAP database for this kind of work. If your report cycle is 24 minutes, then this is less (but still) feasible -- you'd just have to be more careful in your assessment of whether it's worth the cost of maintaining a separate and unique schema dedicated to the reporting side of the system.

Have you done any performance tests already to determine if what you want to do does or does not work properly on the extant hardware and database? I'd assume you have, if you're looking at ways to reduce that load.

If it's marginal, just throw more CPU and memory at the problem.

Tune the crikey out of your database.

Depending where you are in the development cycle, the option of de-normalising your primary database may exist.

As I say .. huge question, with way too many variables.