Re: Report Writing Software

At the risk of appearing to endorse (under rules of my employment I am not allowed to do so) a third party report tool: We are running Informix SE runtime. That means, of course, that our users don't have access to the ACE Report Writer. (Not, that they'd necessarily want it.) However, the powers that be were eventually persuaded that the users might actually want reports other than those delivered with the system. Oh, I forgot, we are in UNIX SYS V/386 (or 3B2) Release 3.2.x. We have gone with a report writer called Intelligent Query. It is produced by IQ Software Corporation out of Norcross, GA. IMHO it's not nearly as intelligent as it could be. In as much as this is an overview or a heads up of the report writer. Please take the following information in such a ligth. Formatting output is good; better than ACE. However, I have not yet found a way to get it to create temporary tables during the query process. This means that ACE can do some things that IQ can't. It is a menu driven report writer. In order for it to be useful, IQ must be told some things about the database. What it is, where it is, what the schema is. Someone who is knowledgeable about the database (usually, one of the development staff) can rename column names to ones more understandable (at least in our applications) and tell IQ what the join columns are. This then will allow users to select the table they would like (actually, a database category, in IQ parlance) and which columns; the report type and a host of other menu options. The manual is not as clear as it could be (what vendor manual is?). However, all-in-all it is easier to use than ACE for most simple queries. Once again, this is not a review of the product nor is it an endorsement of the product (my employer frowns on such things). All other disclaimers apply. George Teachman USDA-SCS Fort Collins, Colorado