Re: BI / Reporting tools

On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 12:33 PM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jamal, what do you mean by "provide better reporting"? Most of the comments
in this discussion are geared toward end-users needing tools. That begs the
question, are you more interested in a tool for end users? Or a tool for
developers?

Developers may just use in-the-box interfaces such as STRSQL and IBM i
Navigator to build SQL Views, while end-users may need "wizards" for
building and cataloging queries.

Do reports need to be part of a periodic process? Or just ad-hoc querying?
--

Thanks Nathan,

This is much more of a complicated question than can somebody suggest a query tool which is cheap and easy to use.

For that matter, IBM Data Studio Client is free and it is simple to create a native DB2 for i SQL statement in the Query Builder without having to know anything about DB2 syntax.

The main issue is who do you plan on giving database access to, how much access do you want them to have to your data, is the database the main production database and are there enough resources to support any new reporting request.

I deliver +2,000 man hours of DB2 training throughout many departments in our organization yearly.

Why, because it is necessary. I'll refer to Mike Cain's DB2 for i Database Engineer – A Description of the Job blog here: http://db2fori.blogspot.com/2012/11/db2-for-i-database-engineer-description.html

Weekly training is needed to try and reduce the number of unintended Cartesian joins which are found running monthly. It is needed to prevent the many times the Query Engine has to create a temporary index because a keyed field was missed. It is needed to show how to tune queries which take hours to run instead in seconds.

All of these things can be extremely detrimental to the performance of the system.

Our systems are some of the largest and most robust Power servers and it is definitely a full time job keeping things quiet.

Jim