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Re: Which reporting software?

From: Daniel Morgan <dmorgan_at_exesolutions.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 17:33:43 GMT
Message-ID: <3D6671E6.8CA942CE@exesolutions.com>


Niall Litchfield wrote:

> "JA" <Cash_at_NOSPAM.com> wrote in message
> news:go5cmu80gbkmhl6ik18ucn3b3ic2prekuf_at_4ax.com...
> > We always need ad hoc capabilites. We would also like some reports to
> > run automatically based on dates, days of the week, or some trigger.
> >
> > I am not sure what you mean by "to stage data" though. Could you
> > elaborate?
>
> I believe that what Daniel is getting at is that allowing end-users to run
> ad-hoc queries against a transactional database via a graphical interface is
> the quickest way known to man to ruin the performance of said database. When
> performance falls through the floor it will of course be the DBA's fault and
> not in anyway down to the end user who requested the order item details for
> every order from the last 6 years correlated against the top40 position of
> David Bowie records in Albania ordered by the inside leg measurement of the
> wife of the Finance minister from the country of origin of the customers
> marketing director's executive saloon.
>
> The most common way to avoid this is to move data to a seperate reporting
> instance (quite possibly in fact to a data warehouse) in a regular manner.
> This process is probably what is being referred to as 'staging data'. Many
> of the reporting products you refer to allow you to define the data flows
> and aggregate measures for this separate warehouse of historic data in a
> friendly manner. Others of course let you define it all yourself.
>
> --
> Niall Litchfield
> Oracle DBA
> Audit Commission UK
> *****************************************
> Please include version and platform
> and SQL where applicable
> It makes life easier and increases the
> likelihood of a good answer
>
> ******************************************

You are partially correct about what I mean by staging. But I also mean that sometimes the needs of a report require loading a table with data based on logic contained in a stored procedure or package. Most tools, for example Crystal Reports allow you to execute an Oracle stored procedure but only if it returns the dataset to the report via a REF CURSOR. It is does not have anything like the sophistication of the Oracle Reports triggers that allow you to use database code to prepare data and then retrieve the result set from one or more tables.

JA ... by expensive I mean that any that do any real work will be in the many hundreds to a few thousand dollar range. The difference in cost is the kind of nonsense picked up on my management types that know little about managing IT. The real cost difference is in the wasted development hours when they buy a cheap product and force developers to spend countless hours creating workarounds.

A few years back I was on an Oracle-Teradata project where they chose Cognos as the report writer. Before the project could produce a single report the team had to add a C programmer just to add capabilities that were already built into Oracle Reports as a default.

If your interest is ad hoc queries I would suggest looking at Oracle Discoverer and Business Objects.
If your interest is basic to intermediate level reporting any product will do. If your interest is in complicated and sophisticated reports I'd go straight to Oracle Reports.

If management tries to accomplish any two of the above in a single product ... quit while you still have your sanity.

Daniel Morgan Received on Fri Aug 23 2002 - 12:33:43 CDT

Original text of this message

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