Re: Impromptu

IMO Impromptu is currently one of the two best ad-hoc query tools out there, and I wish I could combine it with the other. Impromptu is just plain sickening its a reporting too that a db novice could use that produces reports that are still painful in some products developers use (looks over at his report writer manuals). Impromptu has incredible support for the technical issues, they seem to have implemented every kind of query engine control they could think of, can connect to multiple databases of different times and run reports against data spread out across the seperate databases. In short impressive.

No, I won't leave you hanging on the other. Its FindIt! by OpenData, this one has completely different strengths. I'll address the strengths then compare in the next paragraph. If impromptu can be used by a db novice, findit could be run by a manager. The closest analogy I can come up with is imagine pointing your www broswer into your database with links following the relations and the ability to provide default reports for different objects (if you don't like the dynamically built one). You can literally surf your data. It has a very sophisticated/automated administration tool so that your users are looking at business objects/terms, not relational layouts. The user can use the tool and not even know boolean logic, although it is helpful for the advanced features. This tool can even win people over who are usually afraid of computer interfaces. Its also imo incredible.

I wish I could combine these two tools, but that would be hard since there is a philosophical difference in their design. Impromptu is completely geared at the paper report. Your looking at the wysiwyg presentation of your report output most of the time. Impromptu excells at online data browsing. It shows you the data and if your building a report, and decide thats what you want, you then go and setup the formating. FindIt! does better at providing a information tool to people who have no clue about databases. Impromptu does a better job at letting people who at least have a grasp of their business model build more sophisticated reports. Impromptu also wins in a bunch of technical brownie point areas such as access to non-sql sources and stuff that sometimes can be very important to some people and irrelevant to others.

Hope this helps.

Craig Received on Mon Oct 09 1995 - 00:00:00 CET