Re: looking for a good report generation package

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From: Stephen D. Williams (sdw@lig.net)
Date: Mon Jun 12 2000 - 08:14:29 PDT

I've seen many references in the last 5 years to Crystal Reports (created by
Seagate or one of the HD manufacturers). It is used by quite a few companies.

If I had to do a lot of this, I'd couple python (perl would do also) with a
good, clean graphing library and generate HTML or XML directly, using style
sheets. Tables solve most of the headache of size and wrap.

The minor formatting work needed is easily offset by the use of a full
scripting language with indexed collection support that makes it easy to do
arbitrarily complex post-processing of database info.

sdw

John Klassa wrote:

> I'm a developer on an application that uses an Oracle database. One
> of our biggest deficiencies is in the area of reporting... Management
> wants happy, shiny pictures (the usual management variety -- pie charts,
> bar graphs, you name it).
>
> Moreover, the engineers who use the system want the ability to design
> their own (textual) reports. Since the database design for the system
> appears to be in an eternal state of flux, it'd be nice to use a tool
> that lets you abstract away the details of, e.g., how some entity or
> another is stored in the database, and which simply lets you ask for
> "all entities of type X with property Y which are part of subsystem Z
> and which were entered after date D" (and so on).
>
> Anybody had success with a third-party tool for this sort of thing?
> Seems like there are a bunch out there, but I have no experience with
> any of them and don't know anybody I can chat up to get a running start.
>
> If you've got a favorite tool/package for this sort of thing, I'd like
> to hear about it. Our app has a web front-end, so the ideal solution
> will be one that runs on the server back-end (Solaris), in batch mode,
> and merely dumps the results somewhere to be fetched later.
>
> Not, traditionally, a database guy...
> John
>
> --
> John Klassa / klassa@mail.com 

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