Re: ORACLE Report Writer

carl_at_aylnews.demon.co.uk (Carl Revell) wrote:
>Can anyone suggest a good tool for creating reports from an ORACLE 7.0
>database (running on HP9000 under HP-UX) that run under Windows on a
>PC client (excluding MS Access)?
>
>I am looking for something that could possibly be used by end-users,
>so is fairly straightforward to create basic reports, but one which
>the IT department can also use to create more complex reports.
>
>Are there report writers that don't use ODBC? If so, what do they use
>to communicate between the PC and the ORACLE database?

Carl--There are lots of front-ends to Oracle and other databases. We are experimenting with Impromptu from Cognos, which fits your bill pretty well, but is $500/seat. Forest & Trees, and the tool from those guys that make ODBC drivers in Md. . . . I forget the name. Lots of others. Even SAS! Saw a neat demo of their new 6.11 product (aka Orlando) with an Oracle interface and push-button queries. But $$$! Oracle has their Data Query tool, too. And of course they bought the IRI Express OLAP company last year and are selling that as an option.

Impromptu and most of the "high-end" (high-priced) products come with their own "native" Oracle drivers, and that's probably key. I went to the Oracle Users Group conference in Philadelphia and heard a session on this subject (front-ends) that basicall said that the "desktop" DB's like Access, Paradox, really could NOT be considered serious query tools becasue they are so dumb about handling the Oracle cursor and joins, etc: you open a 1,000,000-row database and they want to suck teh whole thing across the 'net to your hard drive!

Meanwhile, we are drifting toward realization that for really free-form queries you need a "warehouse", aka multidimensional database or "cube" with lots of fancy indexes, denormalized data (pre-calced aggregates), and a star-schema-aware optimizer. We're trying to get Oracle 7.3 (not quite yet avail on HP, apparently) to see how far they have come in duplicating the "warehouse/OLAP" functionality.

Let us know how you come out!! Received on Tue Apr 16 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST