Georg Breazu

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since November 15, 2004

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November 15, 2004, on Data Warehousing:
Crystal Reports is not the reporting tool usually choosen for ad-hoc querying of datawarehouses, so maybe that's the reason your end customers weren't very happy about it. Tools better suited to this task are BusinessObjects (who also aquired CrystalReports a couple of month ago), Brio (aquired by Hyperion about 1 year ago), Microstrategy, Oracle Discoverer and Cognos. All of them allow you to build metadata about the datamodel of the datawarehouse and present the end user with the world in terms known to them (no criptic database table column names, predefined filter conditions and so on). For the end-user it's really only a matter of dragging and dropping the "objects" in their report and "pressing" a button. The tool will the generate the proper SQL, query the database (some of them even rewrite the query if you have aggregate tables, allow you to "join" in the report query results from different queries and databases or take a stored procedure as the data source) allow you to do sim...