Re: Ad-hoc Report Writers

herbb@jcdcrs4.jobcorps.org (Herb Blacker) wrote: :Forgive me for re-posting this message, but surely there's more than :one or two DBA's out there that have a recommendation on a user-friendly :ad-hoc report writer (it would also be great if it was also powerful :enough for pre-builts). It may be because very few actually have end users that can create their own reports. Even with the simplest and most top notch design in a report writer it's usually hard to design reports to run from a standard OLTP type database. With better report writers you can predefine joins (usually with a lot of work), rename fields and do other things to simplify the process, but it's still hard. I have one end user who have learned enough to do this and use Cognos Impromptu and MS Access for the purpose. Otherwise the way to make it possible for end users to realy work on the data themselves is to set them up with some kind of OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) tool. We are testing several of these now. The better ones are too expensive for most of our purposes, but we are looking at Cogonos PowerPlay and some others to see if they can be used. We are also looking at creating a special database with a star schema where we would transfer data for reporting purposes. Using a star schema and appropriate tools may make reporting and analysis similarly simple. Check out http://www.rkimball.com/ and the book he have written for more information on this. :>>>>>> Original message text :We're currently using Crystal Reports for our pre-built reports. We :have users (*very* non-technical) in the field who need an easy-to-use :ad-hoc report writer for Informix (we use v5.x, v7.1 and 7.2 on IBM :RS/6000's running AIX). Does anyone out there have any recommendations? :If it can be used to build our standard reports, that would be fine also. :<<<<<< :TIA, :Herb : : ------------------------------------------------------------------------- : Herb Blacker : Cimarron, Inc. : Database Administrator - DOL Job Corps San Marcos, Texas : ------------------------------------------------------------------------ : Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org