Re: Best Reporting Tools???

From: Simon Hedges <shedges_at_hhhh.freeserve.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 14:53:14 +0100
Message-ID: <7ua055$33d$1_at_news5.svr.pol.co.uk>


We use a mixture of Oracle Reports and Discoverer. Oracle Reports is everything that other responses have said. However, it is a programming tool used to design reports, and so it relatively inflexible: when your users want an extra column, or an extra total etc to be added to an existing Report (one of our major causes of Change Requests), then you have to reprogram to the Report, or build a new one.

With Discoverer (also Business Objects and other similar ad-hoc query tools) the user themselves can design and create their own reports (within the bounds that you set for them). Since we introduced Discoverer, the number of change requests from users asking us to create/amend Reports for them,
has decreased enormously. To give an example, one a system that we have just rewritten, the original system had about 40 Reports. When we re-wrote the system we introduced Discoverer: we now have 3 Oracle Reports only - the users create the rest of their reports themselves using Discoverer.

Reports and Discoverer and both Web Enabled.

Simon Hedges
Gloucester
UK Received on Sat Oct 16 1999 - 15:53:14 CEST

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