Database Extraction Tool Help and Education

Databasers,

[Quoted] I need to find a database extraction tool for Oracle databases. I hope this is the newsgroup for this query. I have attempted to find my answers by reading through some of the comp.database groups, but I am not having any luck. If this is not the correct discussion group, could someone point me in the right direction?

I am not well educated on DBs. At present, this is an extra task for me. I will be feeding our huge, technical, Unix (Solaris), Oracle database when it is finished in the future. I will also be extracting data into all kinds of reports. There are a series of contractors that have been hired to do the detailed programming on the database and will be working database extraction issues too. Here are my questions:

1. Are there commercial tools that can extract data into all kinds of data into all kinds of reports? Examples of reports include: Framemaker Documents, HTML pages, HTML query tools, aerodynamic and structural modelling programs, and possibly >>shudder<< PowerPoint presentations.
   (I've heard of a program called WebObjects, is this along the right
   path?)
2. Assuming they exist, could you list 3 or 4 of these programs?
3. My minimal, on the fly education seems to tell me that I can't get it all under one roof. Will it be necessary to purchase one tool to work FrameMaker issues, and one tool to do HTML, etc?
4. At present, our DB feeding program is quite slow. Us users are unsure whether its due to the expanse of our DB, or whether it's due to the programming tools used by the DB programmers to write the DB feeder. Does DB feeding and extraction go really slow for huge DBs?
5. Finally, would it just be better to let our DB contractors write all the scripts to interface the DB with our products? We're really afraid that it'll run really slow. Also, because our management creates new
   (and different) products for us to write every other day, a specific
   script could become outdated within a month. If the contractors have to write scripts continuously, they'll probably get behind. And that's a bad thing.

[Quoted] Thanks for your help,
Aerich Strobel
... you guessed it. I work for the Federal Government. Received on Sun Apr 12 1998 - 00:00:00 CEST