Hello everybody, I am 6-year IT professional who has only done Perl for
that time. I have done countless jobs with Perl and MySQL as buddies.
As you all know, MySQL doesn't have the reporting facilities that I
have heard about in Oracle, SQL Server, and I would assume Informix and
DB2.

Needless to say, I deal with databases that lack referential integrity
and are not properly normalized.

What I would like to know about is just how easy report generation can
be with a high quality database and what tools do they offer for this?

I've mainly used Linux, but I imagine that SQL server must do a bang-up
job of allowing users to query the database in natural langauge and get
a report emailed to them in Excel format or something like that.

My dream is to get beyond doing things in program code that should be
done in the database and would like to hear some of your stories about
how great report generation is going for you in the world beyond weenie
wimpy databases

Thanks for your time.

"metaperl" <metaperl (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

Microsoft but its reporting tools are far ahead of SQL Server. You can
use it with any database that has an ODBC driver. You can use iReport
<http://ireport.sourceforge.net/> or OpenOffice Base
<http://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html> with any database that
has a JDBC driver. The most pervasive report generator, Crystal
Reports
<http://www.businessobjects.com/products/reporting/crystalreports/default.asp>,
can be used with (almost) any database. I believe that the only "high
quality database" provider that also offers powerful reporting tools
is Oracle <http://www.oracle.com/tools/tools_editions.html>.

David Segall wrote:

Interesting. Someone told me that SQL Server had an OLAP set of
services that was very good.

Oh and thanks David for this informative reply.

"metaperl" <metaperl (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

should ignore my response. It was based on tools that use SQL
statements combined with elementary operations on part or all of the
result set to produce a report.