Generating information with the touch of a button

Make It Snappy!

Article from ADMIN 02/2010

By James Mohr

In any business you are going to find hundreds, if not thousands, of different kinds of data. Collecting and presenting it is a snap with the right tools.

From sales to purchases to basic customer information and beyond – by itself, data is not useful until it is analyzed or processed into a form more easily understood by humans. Visualizing data in different forms can support a company's decision-making process, providing not only historical and current states, but also providing predictions about how things might evolve in the future.

Going into the details of data analysis is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I am going to talk about some tools meant to help you access and present data, beyond simply drawing a few color graphs. In fact, graphing is just one small part of reporting, and being able to display data graphically and from different data sources is pretty much a given.

The Shape of Things

To go beyond simply executing queries against a database and displaying the results in tables, you must be able to perform so-called "data transforms," whereby the retrieved data is sorted, grouped, summarized, and perhaps even filtered. Although these are common processes within an SQL query, often the difficulty is in performing all four steps in a single query.

To be useful, your tool needs to access all of your data sources. If the application provides a Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) interface, it can probably access data in many contexts. However, you might need to find and install a database-specific file (e.g., a JAR file), which could be the difficult part.

Not universally available is the ability to display data conditionally (i.e., displaying a field when certain criteria are met). Although logic often can be written into database procedures, you would require knowledge of both SQL and your particular database that most report or business intelligence developers do not have. By shifting this kind of logic to the reporting tool, developing complex, dynamic reports

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