PokerTracker

if i import a group of hands and all i want to do is export csv reports of certain stats. do i need to do cluster and update cache or can i just do update cache? i know i need to do update cache for all the custom pt stats i've got.

You don't even NEED to rebuild the cache - the reports will work fine, the cache (and the rest of the housekeeping) just improves performance so it depends how big your DB is and how many new hands you import as to whether you need to update it.

with db's over 10 million hands that are created once and used to grab the custom reports once per stat seem to create the reports a lot quicker with update cache.

If you're importing millions of hands, updating the cache can't be a bad idea, it just takes time. If you're importing a few thousand hands, it matters a whole lot less.

so updating cache definitely speeds up the custom report creation. back to my original question, so does clustering help at all or is it just the cache that i need to do to make the reports go quickly?

Clustering will help if you've imported enough hands since the last cluster was run. If you're doing one big import than not touching the database again, it would be worthwhile to cluster once.