Re: Enterprise/Production Quality Reporting Tool

The company I work for spent a lot of time evaluating reporting tools for both batch and adhoc processing for use with an ORACLE database. We originally chose Cognos Impromptu. However, we soon found that it didn't have the flexibility required for our reports (and it also performs all procesing on the client - ie. no offline batch processing). Due to Impromptu's limitations, we ended up writing a lot of our reports in perl, outputting to temporary tables which were then 'displayed' using Impromptu.

Anyway, we recently have switched to SQR. This is a server based product, which has its own 3GL/4GL reporting language. It does have a Windows GUI layout tool - it isn't as fancy or as easy to use as a lot of other reporting layout tools, but its OK for simple ad hoc reports.

SQR is the only product we have seen that has the flexibility we require, and is suitable for both offline and online reporting. Other products we looked at closely included VCQ, GQL and a Sybase product. We had a brief look at Crystal Reports, but it seemed fairly similar to Impromptu.

Regards,
Michael Harvey
(mgharvey_at_onaustralia.com.au)

On Sat, 07 Jun 1997 12:48:11 -0400, Asad Quraishi <asad.quraishi_at_sympatico.ca> wrote:

>We're migrating a set of databases/applications from VAX/VMS/S1032 to
>Oracle/Solaris and havbe the following issue:
>
>At present we have upwards of 150 reports that print either
>daily/weekly/monthly & will have to re-create them under Oracle. I DO
>NO want us hardcoding these reports in C++/PRO*C and batching them on
>the server. Report modifications/additions will require too much of a
>programmer's time. What I want is a report engine/server which will
>allow me to batch reports overnight and obtain relatively good
>performance for ad-hoc queries. I'm open to using two different tools
>for this.
>
>The only tool I've seen on the market that may do the job is Crystal
>Info which consists of a report server to which clients submit requests.
>It sounds good but I've never used it. It *must* be reliable - I can't
>have 30 reports crash at month end & have to run them during operating
>hours. Input?
>
>I've also heard of Cognos's Impromptu but don't believe it does
>batching. Input?
>
>Other ideas?
Received on Tue Jun 10 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT