[OT] Database reporting software

[Tim Churches]

On Fri, 2004-01-09 at 08:32, Steve Horsley wrote:
> I have an existing system working on MS Access, and software that 
> regularly logs events into it (and deletes old events after a year).
> 
> Now need to move to real servers, probably Solaris though possibly 
> Linux. Modifying the software to update the database (maybe mySQL or 
> Oracle) contents is easy enough, but how do I produce reports 
> (statistics and summaries) on the database contents?
> 
> I could contemplate web based or application based report generation, 
> but are there easy to use draggy-droppy report designing applications 
> around? Just the names would enable me to look them up.

Have a look at the GPLed version(s) of Rekall, which is a cross-platform
semi-clone of MS Access. Still somewhat buggy, I have found, but
definitely usable. And Rekall is programmed in Python, not Visual Basic.
Bliss!

> I am struggling with OpenOffice.org at the moment, trying to see if it 
> can do what I'm looking for, but it doesn't seem to be able to do GROUP 
> BY and SUM() - simple aggregation stuff.

Yup, you probably need to do those in your database back-end first. But
as a line-listing or report formatter (if the data manipulation and
aggregation is done beforehand), OpenOffice has quite a lot to recommend
it,particularly if integration with text commentary is required. And it
too is drivable with Python (albeit somewhat painfully and slowly via
PyUNo - but it does work). Suggest you look at Rekall, though.

-- 

Tim C

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