[thelist] Best Practices For Online Report Formatting

Luther, Ron ron.luther at hp.com
Tue May 17 08:49:41 CDT 2005


Burhan Khalid asked about on-line reporting software:


Hi Burhan!

>>I'm looking for any tools, pointers, stylesheets, etc. for formatting 
>>reports for both online viewing and printing.  

You can, of course, roll your own - and, in most languages I think,
there 
are a number of modules you can 'borrow' and re-purpose. There are a
couple 
of downsides to consider: (1) 'time to deploy' can be a bit slow on
custom 
apps, (2) reporting systems tend to grow over time - so you end up with 
maintenance and modification efforts, and (3) you can hit some
challenging 
size and timeout limitations when enabling detail level reporting ...
the 
"show me everything that went into *that* number" reports that the users

will eventually be asking for.

I thought, instead, I'd offer some quick reviews on some of the
available 
'enterprise' reporting packages. None of these are 'cheap'. All of these

probably also require each of your end users to install the client-side 
portion of the software in order to use your reports:

* Oracle Browser - It's been a few years since I used this so it may be 
improved now.  On the downside, it offered rather minimal functionality.

However, it was very stable and reasonably quick.

* Oracle Reports - It's been a few years since I used this. Hopefully it

is much improved now.  The version I used was obviously developed by 
mainframe weenies. (No offence to any mainframe weenies on the list.) It

was a powerful product.  However, the 'design interface' was one of the 
most painful things I've ever used. [1] If you need to add a field to an

existing report and it's easier to do a clean sheet redesign of the
entire 
report than to simply modifying the existing report ... then the design 
interface sucks.  That's Oracle reports.

[1] IIRC, the interface was very similar to that used by Focus back in
the 
mid 80's.  That 'frames' concept, designed to enable crosstab reporting,

has not improved with age. (Crosstab reporting, in my experience, is
very 
rare. Designing a product to make that easy - and 'normal' reporting
difficult 
is, in my opinion, a very poor idea.)

* Crystal Reports - It's been a few years since I've attempted to use 
Crystal. I'll be kind and suggest that perhaps our install was
misconfigured. 
I can only hope that was the issue because this was the worst piece of 
trash masquerading as 'software' that I've ever used.  It was
'unstable'. 
Run the report you are developing - get an answer.  Make no changes. Run
the 
report again and get a different answer.  Try to debug in an environment

like that!  It was awful.

[Note 1 - A 'cut-down' version of Crystal is included with every new SAP

install, so if your company uses SAP you may have access to Crystal.]

[Note 2 - Business Objects bought Crystal 2 or 3 years ago.  They appear

to be pushing the Crystal product.  They also appear to be merging BO 
and Crystal.]

* Brio - I've been using Brio for about 5 years now.  It has some
quirks, 
but I find it a very interesting and powerful product.  It also allows 
you to use JavaScript, (with their proprietary DOM), to build some nice 
front-ends to your reports, modify SQL on the fly, modify order of
execution 
on the fly, and dynamically add db and computed fields to the output.
It's 
a pretty flexible environment!

[Note 1 - Brio was purchased by Hyperion (the folks who sell ESSBASE) 2 
or 3 years ago. They appear to be pushing Brio to their traditional 
customer base.  I haven't heard any rumors of merging the products.]

* Business Objects - I've only been using BO for a few months now, so I 
don't know all of the quirks of the product. It looks to be a decent 
'data mining' tool.  As a 'report application' tool, it seems to be 
a step or two down from Brio.  Since the BO folks seem to be
concentrating 
on Crystal I have concerns over how much development effort will be 
put into BO.



The 'business intelligence' knowledge base at ITTOOLBOX.COM has a number
of 
articles and tips from practitioners using various reporting packages.
While 
many of the articles may seem to concentrate on 'work-arounds' for
specific 
products, oftentimes the same article can be seen as an effort to
improve 
report usability - and may be worth a read from that PoV.

HTH,


RonL.


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