Re: A good argument for XML

From: <arthernan_at_hotmail.com>
Date: 15 Jul 2005 08:46:22 -0700
Message-ID: <1121442382.611589.186570_at_z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>


>> event
>> participant
>> agenda
>> survey_headings
>> ce_data
>> faculty
>> participant
>
>So you have several tables, and the join graph is a tree? Nothing
>special here.

I don't think you are giving me the benefit of the doubt. I'll be more specific. An event in our database is a class held in a hotel or like. Each participant gets a packet with several pages which include an agenda, a participant list, faculty, CE forms, a survey form and this is probably just a third of the current contents of the report.

Now how many roundtrips? We have classes of 300 people so you do the math.

Now let me save some time here. Someone could say aha!! you are talking about separate reports. Well this report is made into a single postscript file one class at a time. And then it's sent to be printed by a third party.

>going to digest all this information in a second. The latency of user
>processing your report indicates that, perhaps, he can afford waiting a
>minute or two while the report is generating.

You are correct; the user can wait on this one. And for the size of the report 5 to 20 minutes is't actually pretty impressive. But maintaining these kinds of reports is a nightmare. All the queries are separated from each other. And fields that were already queried at the top level "have" to be queried again. I wander if the self imposed tabular output restriction is preventing the report from running in less than a minute.

Any report can be made from tabular results, that is how most people traditionally do them. Tools have been developed so a simple two level hierarchy is easy to handle. Even this complex report is working with tabular input. The finished content in this case is clearly hierarchical, and it is in a substantial amount of cases.

Arturo Hernandez Received on Fri Jul 15 2005 - 17:46:22 CEST

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