Re: Reporting - Casting about for ideas

Jared.Still_at_radisys.com wrote:
>
> Dear List,
>
> First, a little background. A coworker and I have been charged with
> developing and implementing a 'short term' 'Reporting Solution'.
>
> Glossary:
>
> short term: low cast, fast to implement, throw it away late next year
>
> Reporting Solution: Some method to make it easy for users to
> see oft run reports without re-running them on the production SAP
> ( and other apps also ) systems.
>
> The goal of the 'Reporting Solution' is perceived performance.
> Only 1 or 2 of these reports have any detrimental performance
> impact on the servers. The goal is to allow users to view current
> and historic reports ( up to 90 days ) without being required to
> wait on reports to run on the application/database servers.
>
> This is partly political, partly user friendly.
>
> The political part is that we want to do *something* for users so
> that it looks like we're taking their requirements to heart, even
> though we don't have the resources to do much right now.
>
> The user friendly part is that we want to do *something* for users so
> that we can make their jobs a little easier, even though we don't
> have the resources to do much right now.
>
> One idea we have is to have an ABAPer ( SAP programmer ) setup
> the most requested reports to run in batch mode with a specified range
> of dates and whatever parameters are needed.
>
> This would be done periodically, the report output put on a network
> filer or database or something accessible via browser ( no shared
> drive type solution, access is to iffy ), and a web page that would allow
> simple navigation to reports by Category/Date.
>
> Click on the report, view your data.
>
> One thing that this is *not*, is a data warehouse and/or data marts.
>
> This is to be a low cost solution. Some software OK, a server is Ok
> if necessary. The key is fairly easy and quick implementation.
>
> I'm open to any and all ideas you may have for this, experiences doing
> similar projects, etc. If it uses Oracle software, that's cool, if not,
> that's
> cool too. Oracle is involved in any solution: at the very least, that's
> where
> all our source data is stored.
>
> Thanks for reading this long winded message.
>
> Jared
>

Jared,

    I like the idea of putting the reports on the intranet much. I have done something similar some years ago with e-mails sent automatically to give job status. It's easy to administer. The main problem I see is the _identification_ of reports; if you can define a kind of 'primary key' for reports (dates - criteria (XMLized perhaps if there can be a varying number of criteria) you can probably store a pointer (BFILE) to all available reports in some table, fill it with batch reports and even - there always be somebody wanting that non-standard report - run reports on-demand and make them available to the wide world.

HTH, Stephane Faroult
Oriole Software

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Author: Stephane Faroult
  INET: sfaroult_at_oriole.com

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