RE: dw tool question

This is something I am currently dealing with.

We have two products here: Business Objects and BRIO. It depends on what kind of end-user you expect to support. The main difference I see between these two is that Business Objects can easily hide the metadata detail and joins from the L-user. However, this requires the use of a repository to store the data. Note: Access does NOT WORK FOR THIS - there were lock problems.

Brio requires knowledge of the ERD, and therefore a more skilled user.

An example: A programmer that didn't understand the ERD wrote a query with Brio and didn't know why she was getting 64 rows per row in another table. Well, it was because she forgot to put a condition on the time stamp. And she missed a couple of other joins as well. Sure, she understood once I explained the ERD to her, and suddenly the query ran just fine, returning the correct results. When we turn this loose to our user community, there will be 3 programmers assigned to Brio reporting. With Business Objects, the user community had been running their own reports for years with a very simple universe.

So I guess it's dependent upon what kind of end-user you plan to support. If you have some really savvy users, Brio is a good choice. If you have users who expect to just refresh and get their report without wanting to know why and how, then BO fits the bill.

We are being pushed away from BO to Brio and I don't like it... I just remind myself that "it's just a job", sigh and remind myself that every company makes dumb decisions like this.

Oh well. Another day, another grey hair.

Bruce, in your experience, has Brio been customized to the extent that I'm describing above with BO? I'd love to hear your comments, on the list or off.

Thank you

Lisa Koivu
Oracle Babytoy Administrator
Fairfield Resorts, Inc.
5259 Coconut Creek Parkway
Ft. Lauderdale, FL, USA 33063

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, January 13, 2003 12:04 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

>We have a new datawarehouse project. I didn't involve in this project at
>beginning. Right now, I was assigned to the group for picking a front
>end reporting tool. So far I know the manager prefer brio, cognos and
>business intelligent product.
>
>Does anyone familiar with those tools? Can you give me some feedback as
>dba standpoint of view, like how report distributed, power user vs end
>user, performance and security advange or disadvantage, concerns?

Me! Me! Pick me! (Oooh, a topic I can answer! :-)

If your manager likes Brio, then that is a plus. Brio is a good product for any reporting from simple to moderately complex. I've used it extensively and have always been impressed with how it is able to tackle tasks that seem to be out of their area of comfort. The tool has a nice Portal-like ability that uses JavaScript internally to allow fairly complex customization. They also have options for distributed reporting, push-vs-pull reporting, etc. About the only negative I've seen with Brio is that they locally cache the hypercube. Thus if you want your hypercube to be refreshed automatically, you either need their push technology or a different product. If that doesn't matter to you (and in fact, many see that as a plus, since it makes for easy static snapshots), then it works great. Obviously, their thin-client version does not store the hypercube locally. It may store it on the server, I'm not sure. Their pricing is "okay", and they do barter for lower prices.

As somone already pointed out, Business Objects is also a good choice for moderate to complex projects. In my mind, the biggest problem with BO is that it takes sooo long to get going with their stuff. You can get a simple portal up and going with a couple reports in Brio in a few days, without ever having touched their product before. Try that in BO and you'll be there for at least double the time. On the positive side, once you get proficient, BO scales a lot better, and can handle just about any reporting/DW needs you'll ever have. Price is about the same, and they too barter.

Crystal Analysis is definitely the price-point winner, and a lot of people know how to use Crystal Reports, so it makes getting skilled labor easier. Their product is definitely not as capable at the moderate-to-complex end, but for simple reporting it's about as easy as it comes. I've just never been able to trust Seagate all that much. They change their product names and offerings almost yearly, they don't give any warm fuzzies for continued existence of their products, and their pricing is haphazard and at the whim of whatever sales person you talk to. I hate that. Don't even ask me about the whole Crystal Info debacle or I'm going to get mad. ;-)

As a side note, I like (and have chosen) Sagent for data warehousing. It's more than just a reporting tool, since it does the ETL side of things, schema operations, automation, Portal-like functions, etc. But it's very powerful and blows the socks off of any piecemeal collection of software that does the same thing. And lest we forget, Sagent used to be the engine for Oracle's data warehousing solution as recently as two years ago, so even Oracle thinks highly of them.

One last thought: if TWDI has a conference coming up in your area, it's worth going to if you can get there. One of the presenters goes through a terrific in-depth evaluation of all the data warehousing tools on the market, including reporting tools. Some say it's worth the cost of the conference in what you save buying products.

Anyhow, hope that helps.

thanks,
bruce

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