Re: Report writer for MAC

Subject: Report writer for MAC
From: John Metzger, metzger_at_eskimo.com Date: Thu, 3 Nov 1994 18:49:02 GMT
In article <CypGA9.JCI_at_eskimo.com> John Metzger, metzger_at_eskimo.com writes:
>We're looking for a report writer with the following qualifications
>
>It's being run by idiots (sorry..unsophisticated users)
>Needs to run on MAC and Windows
>OLE enabled (must be able to embed in a document)
>ODBC interface (initially to oracle)
>
>If anybody has any suggestions drop me aline at metzger_at_eskimo.com
>or post here...thanks
>
>John

We've used GQL for several years now with good results. We're on a Mac platform, but it is available for Windows 3.1 and Motif. I don't know about OLE for sure; the Mac version does support publish/subscribe. Connection to the database can be done in a variety of ways: DAL, EDA/SQL, DB vendor products and even an ASCII/TCP/IP background terminal emulator.

Be sure about the user requirements before launching into this. We mistakenly tried to sell GQL to users who wanted sophisticated, heavily formatted reports. GQL can do some output formatting and can generate most anything you can think up in SQL (I can't figure out how to do a table self-join, but few users want that), but it lacks some of the capabilities you'll find in a traditional report writer like UDMS (like internal cursors or complicated if-then-else logic constructs). Users who want a quick and easy way to grab a chunk of data and throw it into a spreadsheet think GQL is great.

Another side note: whatever product(s) you look at, be sure to take a good look at the network traffic generated when building a query. We turned down DataPrism because of this (it reads the database catalogs for the list of tables and columns). GQL doesn't generate any network traffic until the query is sent, then it waits silently until the data is returned.

Dennis Weatherly
Mentor Graphics Corporation
dennis_weatherly_at_mentorg.com Received on Mon Nov 07 1994 - 18:02:48 CET