Re: question on oracle to combine with reports software

"j" <perseus_medusa_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<3e5a3424$1_at_newsgate.hknet.com>...
> Hi all ,
>
> I am now working in a company and they are using crystal report with
> oracle database. They told me not to draw data directly from all tables into
> the report. Rather, on application level, they trigger a stored proc to
> insert all the retrieved data into another "tailor made" table for report
> and then forward to crystal report to draw the data from the table. They
> said that they can customize the logic better and run faster. They sounds
> right but I am not sure if this trivial approach is the best practice.
> Please advise.

Think of it as ETL (extract, transform and load) as you would for a data warehouse. There are good ways and bad, but if you do it right it can go much faster than whatever weirdness OCI or ODBC software will come up with to pound your db. While it may have been proven that relational technology can be as fast as non-R, here you see an example where it is too difficult (for OCI or ODBC generators) to generalize in practice.

I often find a couple of reports at a site are amenable to some sort of extract like this, if only because they implement a complex set of business rules that require horrendous joining. So I write some bizzaro awk and sqlload and get orders of magnitude faster, and people are impressed, although it can hardly be considered a "best practice."  If they've managed to do this more generally with stored procedures, so much the better.

jg

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