Often ready informational system includes not only the means of input and editing of the data, but also analysis tools of the data entered by users and means of presenting them in a more readable form (charts, pivot tables, reports), allowing making valid decisions (for example, about future directions of business development). This article is devoted to these products that are often called by the generic term Business Intelligence (BI) tools.
The modern means of Business Intelligence are reporting tools, the means of analytical data processing, tools of development of BI-applications (BI Platforms) and the so-called Enterprise BI Suites – tools for analysis and processing the data of the enterprise, which allow implementing the set of actions related to data analysis and creation of reports, and often include an integrated set of BI-tools and tools of development of BI-applications.
Reports and tools of their creation.
The report is a document the content of which is dynamically generated on the basis of information contained in the database. Such a document may consist of several parts – the headers and footers, repeating on every page; the title that is at the beginning of the report; areas which contain actual data; areas which have aggregate data (sums, averages, etc.), and others. Reports can contain data from one or more tables or queries, as well as data from one or more records. Data of one record may take one line in the printed table, a rectangular area on the sheet, as well as a list or even a few sheets.
An undisputed leader of the market among the tools of creating a report is Seagate Crystal Reports of the company Seagate Software.
In addition to Crystal Reports, there are several well-known products of this class created by the producers of DBMS (Oracle Reports Developer, Sybase InfoMaker, etc.). Since these products are created by the manufacturers of DBMS, they can be easily integrated primarily with DBMS, while often using data access of these databases based on client API. However, in most cases they support getting data from other sources.
Nowadays we are living in the world of high technologies. These days the more your business is automated, the better, particularly in respect of Business Intelligence. Reporting is a very significant thing. So if you need to automate your reporting activities, you might think of trying SQL Server solution. Automated reporting will help eliminating manual process and saving time and money. Visit this Crystal Reports site to find out more details.
And keep in mind that our world is the world of modern Internet technologies. It would be intelligent to make use of the online network to search for anything on the best terms available on the market. Search engines, social networks, blogs and forums – all this will assist you to solve many issues.
