.Net Reporting against Oracle

Here's my issue. We've decided to replace a very critical (without it the business would lose lots of money) departmental reporting system with a built from scratch system based on .NET. The key component is a datagrid (it really turned the CIO's head).

The issue is that the data source is Oracle. We've got a very complex reporting system that produces dynamic sql and sends it to oracle and takes back the result set and displays it. Each report has at least 3 filters and some more than a dozen. Each filter can either be a single item, a list of 1 to N items or left blank. The idea is to push this into Oracle stored procedures and get back a refcursor. The filters/parameters effect not only the where clause, but can effect the select clause, the from clause (what tables are queried) and when either the from clause or select clause are effected the group by clause is effected. This is a complex database (not large by data wharehouse standards) with indexes and structure that are not friendly to reporting. Speed of the reports is a critical issue. It's something we've fought pretty sucessfully in the old system.

We've also got to have a batch component. That is a number of reports need to run overnight and be available first thing in the morning. This can't be just a single job that runs a bunch of reports. We need each report to run separately. Oh and it needs to not start before certain jobs are finished on the Oracle database.

Oh we've got a schedule of six months - nine months max and the clock is ticking.

For the first issue. Has anyone done something similar. If so any key problems with this (forget buy crystal, cognos etc. It's not cost they are rounding error in our bottom line, but that decision is pretty set also forget a data wharehouse - no time)

Second issue - does anyone know a good scheduler that will integrate well with a .NET solution.

Thanks in advance. Received on Sun May 07 2006 - 08:48:29 CDT