RE: JBA Reporting/Data Warehousing Tools

Glenn, great topic for an exchange of ideas.  My short answer is that I
recommend Crystal Reports because it is inexpensive, flexible, offers nice
viewers for Internet users and is so widely used that many developers are
available with experience on this product.  I'm not aware of any direct
support by Geac/JBA for Crystal, but it works fine with JBA.

We bought our JBA system in a "bundle" and got Visualize, Envisage (w/
Knowledgebase) and IQ/Objects (w/ Knowledgebase).  The only one we've used
so far is IQ/Objects.  I've written probably 15 reports with Objects but
we've never used it on a large scale because it is kind of quirky (use of a
particular version MFC42.DLL conflicts with other PC programs), expensive
and it is not very intuitive (in my opinion).  I should mention, however,
that we haven't received any formal training in Objects.  Finally, I believe
this product is now owned by Computer Associates and is part of their Eureka
series.

To me the biggest factor in making a choice is how well you know the JBA
files and how they should be "joined".  If you know this well, I would
recommend a non-"JBA" tool like Crystal Reports, MS Access and MS Query
(within Excel) as PC tools.  We've also used IBM DB2 Query Manager quite a
bit.  If you don't know JBA files and join conditions well, then the
availability of a JBA Knowledgebase is very helpful (and I believe they have
this available for Cognos as well).  

Another issue is security.  Do you need to offer customized "views" of data
so that a given user can only report on what they are authorized to access.
This can also simplify operation of the system in that it can appear to
"flatten" the database.

As a side note, JBA's method of storing dates as a seven digit number with a
single century digit adds a level of complexity to any query where you want
to do date manipulation.

I consider all of the above reporting tools and not data warehousing per se.
To me, data warehousing implies tools to aggregate data among pre-defined
dimensions (cubes) and often (but not necessarily) this data is stored on a
separate system / database from transactional data so that queries and
reports don't impact operational systems.  JBA Sales Analysis module starts
down this road a little bit.  I believe Vision is considered a data
warehousing tool.  MS SQL Server 7.0 also has some tools for this.  Anyone
know if any vendors have pre-built data warehouse "cubes" against JBA data?

A very important factor for us right now is how well these tools will work
over the Internet.  We've invested quite a bit of time and effort developing
interactive Web reporting for our customers (not to be confused with simply
publishing static spool files to the Web).  One of the key concerns here is
"row level security" meaning each customer should only see the slice of data
that applies to them.  Secondly, you have need a tool that is
multi-threaded.  Previous version of Crystal Reports had some deficiencies
here and made us abandon it as our web reporting engine.  It is my
understanding that this has been corrected in Crystal Reports 8.0.  Another
factor is viewers offered.  I believe Crystal offers an ActiveX view (works
only on MS Windows) and a Java version.  The quality of the viewer greatly
effects the user experience, just has how well it works on a variety of PC's
and versions of browsers affect your support experience. 

I could go on forever on this topic because it is near and dear to my heart.
I have a good feel for what we're looking for, but not a lot of personal
experience using the various tools.  What I will try to put together and
submit to the list for discussion is a wish list of features and maybe users
/ vendors can comment on how the various products meet the requirements. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Glenn Schreiner [mailto:GSchrein@hach.com]
Sent: Friday, March 10, 2000 12:55 PM
To: 'JBAUSERS-L@midrange.com'
Subject: JBA Reporting/Data Warehousing Tools


I'm currently trying to identify all "reporting" and "data warehousing"
tools that JBA has available for their System 21 version 3.5.0 applications.
I'm aware of Envisage, Visualize, Vision, and IQ/Objects, but I'm curious if
there are any others.  We're not currently using any of these products, but
I'd like to know if anyone is and how well the tools seem to work.  I'd also
like to know if anyone else has implemented a "data warehouse" over the JBA
System 21 database.  

We're just starting to research the need for a "data warehouse", or whether
the tools currently available from JBA will satisfy our needs.        
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