Re: Business Objects with DB2 data

<snip>We have to get reporting off the AS/400.</snip>

Why? Because it's slow? Easy solution, AS/400's stopped being made a
decade or so ago. Upgrade to IBM i running on a Power 7. The performance
of these will blow the doors off of an old AS/400. The cache has improved
so much, the processing power is awesome compared to those older machines.
The disk drives are a lot better. If you're journalling I'd also get the
HA Journal Performance option.

There are also a lot of performance tools available on IBM i to help
analyze your query performance. You really need to get to COMMON and take
every Dawn May course you can. If she's not at the fall one, wait until
spring. If time is an issue perhaps a consultant can really help you.
Hopefully one who not only really knows their stuff but can also teach you
how to do this for yourself. It's an ongoing process.

I really agree with creating decent views to handle the data. Our ERP
vendor doesn't store the on hand balance. You have to take opening
balance minus issues plus receipts plus adjustments and it's up to you
whether or not to consider the allocated column (on hand vs available).
And end users having to know to join this file with that file and... Oy
vey! And the 6 character column names with two of them wasted on telling
you what table the column is from. Yep, use some decent views. Indexes
really help but that gets back to performance monitoring.

Is it that they need their results with pretty colors? There are a lot of
packages available to either use a client interface to IBM i or you can
directly run web applications on IBM i to do so. They've been around for
a LONG time.


Rob Berendt