Platinum ProReports 1.4

• Software Interfaces Lab, a division of Platinum Technology Inc., 1400 Broadfield, Ste. 600, Houston, TX 77084; 713-492-0707.
• Pricing: $695.00 Windows or Windows NT client; $1500 X-Windows/Unix client; $10,000 Unix ProServer (optional).
• Minimum Requirements: Client runs on Macintosh, Windows 3.x, Windows NT, and X-Windows on several Unix platforms; 386 processor or better (486/66 MHz system with 16MB recommended). The server is available on several Unix platforms, including HP and S un.

Most client-based report writers carry with them traces of their history as the tools of data center SQL programmers. But they are now becoming the tools of more or less non-technical end users. Balancing the control and complexity associated with SQL pr ogramming and the ease of use associated with end-user desktop publishing is a difficult task. ProReports from Software Interfaces Inc. (recently acquired by Platinum Technology Inc.) sets out to do just that and, on the whole, succeeds.

The Market

• ease of use, from the perspective of non-technical end users
• data publishing abilities, which focus on formatting and presenting data sets, using conventional desktop publishing elements such as rich text and graphics
• desktop integration abilities, which link the report writer to other applications on the intelligent desktop using the appropriate desktop object model technologies
• data access abilities, which integrate the reporting environment into the firm's database management system and middleware infrastructure
• ease of administration, from the perspective of DBAs and system administrators

Platinum ProReports bills itself as a "next-generation data access and reporting tool" based primarily on its superlative capabilities in data access and ease of administration. Its ease of use and data publishing capabilities are, in general, excellent in a market filled with easy-to-use data publishing tools. Its desktop integration capabilities are limited to simple data exchange using the cut-and-paste capabilities of the underlying client operating system. Its Windows client, for example, supports neither DDE, OLE, nor application integration via VBA.

ProReports' data access and administrative capabilities make it a star. The ProReports client application is explicitly designed to work against multiple databases on different servers simultaneously: data sets from multiple sources can be integrated int o a single report. (See Figure 1.) In addition, the ProReports client creates a report specification that can, when a firm has purchased the ProServer product, be sent to a server for execution on either an ad hoc or regular basis. This moves the report processing workload off of the relatively weak client workstation and onto relatively powerful server platforms. Finally--and most important--ProReports contains a wealth of powerful configuration and customization features (all we ll-documented). These allow database and system administrators to configure and deploy ProReports across multiple intelligent desktops with shared configuration and metadata information. The version I tested, ProReports 1.4, is an update release. Accordi ng to its release notes, version 1.4 fixes a variety of minor bugs and feature limitations and adds a few new capabilities, such as toolbars.

Specifications

The client supports ODBC, the native client/server APIs for Informix, CA-OpenIngres, Oracle, Rdb, DB2 and Sybase, as well as SequeLink and IBI's EDA/SQL. This makes it possible to connect ProReports, using a middleware/network combination, to virtually a ny data source in the typical firm.

The ProReports server is a separate component that is required to take advantage of some of the ProReports client's advanced features, such as report shipping. The ProReports server is available on a number of Unix platforms, including HP and Sun.

Configuration and Customization

ProReports allows administrators and DBAs to configure and customize ProReports in several important ways:

• Parameter files, which can be fed to ProReports clients at runtime, contain all the information required to connect to particular databases as well as to select particular reports or report templates for editing or execution. This allows adm inistrators to create desktop icons for end users. The icons hide all details of particular database access methods and security from the end user.
• Preference files, which are both local to a particular client workstation and global, include common Windows features (such as window placement and most-recently used files lists) and powerful query governor settings. These query governor se ttings control how SQL statements from any client are parsed and analyzed prior to execution against the database, as well as the maximum size of result sets that can be retrieved by the client. (See Figure 2) For example, a shared preference file would allow a DBA to configure a group of clients so that GROUP BY clauses are generated automatically on each client, and so that where clauses that do not use indexed columns are treated as errors and are not executed.
• Metadata definition language (MDL) files allow DBAs to filter, rearrange, and mask database schema in complex ways, and produce a logical model of each database tailored for a particular group of end users. Using MDL files, DBAs can present a particular data source to end users in any way they see fit. DBAs can remove columns from tables and tables from databases, customize the queries ProReports uses to extract metadata information from the database, create alternate names for columns and tables, specify join paths, and limit the size of result sets returned from particular data sources.

These features combine to produce a powerful set of configuration tools for LAN administrators and DBAs. These tools are particularly useful in environments in which end users routinely execute SQL against multiple production databases with complex, cryp tic OLTP schema, rather than against one or a few DSS data warehouses and marts with denormalized legible schema. As more and more firms adopt data warehousing models for their DSS infrastructures, some of ProReports' configuration features will become r edundant as things such as column and table filtering and naming are handled in the DSS schemas themselves. Similarly, as more and more metadata management tools, such as Prism's Warehouse Manager, appear on the market, it is likely that ProReports will have to interoperate with those metadata repositories rather than manage its own metadata privately. Nevertheless, by not requiring that its proprietary metadata reside in a relational database, ProReports offers an interesting alternative to data access tools that burden already-creaking OLTP systems. ProReports places the proprietary metadata in a DBMS on the very systems against which the application executes dynamic SQL. This architecture, in effect, doubles or triples the inbound query load against those servers. IS should know better than to let users perform queries against OLTP systems; that's what data marts are for. Also, although proprietary metadata access may not increase the DBMS server load, it is also not shareable and thus imposes extr a administrative burdens.

The ProReports documentation does a thorough job of explaining all of the configuration options available to DBAs and administrators, and provides good examples for more complex features such as join filtering, which uses IF-THEN-ELSE preprocessing logic to permit conditional join statement construction. What the documentation does not provide is a step-by-step process that DBAs and administrators can follow to determine which groups of end users need which types of configuration options. Instead, the p rocess and details of implementing an enterprisewide installation of ProReports with, say, 10 distinct groups of end users, each with personal local parameter files, preference files shared with the group, and global MDL files, is left entirely to the di scretion of the DBA and LAN administrator. The product would clearly benefit by having the manual conclude with a detailed discussion of a real-world installation example.

Operation

Creating and editing basic report formats in ProReports is easy, particularly when you stay close to the database schema and confine the report to database columns and calculated columns. When an end user is working exclusively with database columns and calculated columns, rather than with the result set returned by a complex SQL statement, a report can be designed, populated, and saved or printed in about 10 minutes.

The basic report-writing tools contain a number of useful features, including the ability to construct a report format and then view a partially populated report (rather than a complete report) to test the report's formatting and look-and-feel when popul ated. The tools also have the ability to filter report data on either the client or server side of the connection. The calculated column creation facility is extremely easy to use, and it virtually assures that end users create correct formulas for calcu lations. The crosstab facility is one of the best I've seen, and provides a set of easy-to-use tools for building complex crosstabbed reports. Users can interactively manipulate the crosstab.

However, there are some annoying limitations to the report creation facilities -- for example, the report layout facility does not follow the standard Windows convention that allows a user to select multiple fields and apply formatting constraints to all the fields at once. In addition, there are no facilities for creating graphics from the report data sets. Created reports can be saved in both ProReports' proprietary format and in a variety of flat-file database formats, including Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, a nd SAS data file format.

ProReports does not hide either SQL or its own proprietary expression language from end users, but end users building simple reports would have to go looking for SQL to find it. The query builder within ProReports does do a good job of representing the d atabase to end users and allowing them to construct queries by dragging and dropping column names. The query builder's calculated column capabilities are also superior. But joins, when not preconfigured, were often constructed improperly (which is a prob lem common to many SQL access tools). The use of ProReports' powerful expression language requires some knowledge of basic programming constructs such as IF-THEN-ELSE and paradigms such as inheritance (something that is probably beyond the capability of end users who are not familiar with, say, the Excel macro language or Visual Basic for Applications).

There seems to be a tension in the ProReports report design interface between providing ease of use, and exposing all of the details of ProReports' capabilities to the end user. For example, although the query governor features are designed to be set via a centralized configuration, the details of the query governor are exposed in the end-user interface. A great deal of ProReports' functionality is beyond the needs of the typical knowledge worker, but essential for the data center SQL programmer who hab itually develops very complex ad hoc reports on demand. The product would benefit substantially from a redesign that separated the client into two versions: a lightweight client for run-of-the-mill, simple reporting that provides excellent OLE integratio n with other Windows applications, and a full-featured client interface for DBAs and database programmers who need ProReports' complete battery of features to construct complex analytic reports.

Performance

The ProReports client, when run against local (disk-resident) databases such as Paradox and Access using ODBC interfaces, exhibits better-than-average performance. It reads approximately 500 rows per second from an Access 2.0 database, and 600 rows per s econd from a dBASE IV database on a Pentium 100 MHz system with PCI IDE drives and 16MB of RAM.

Documentation

Splitting the user's guide into basic and advanced volumes makes sense given the wide range of end-user functionality that the client application provides. The basic user's guide begins with a tutorial on creating reports, and covers what are probably th e essential report-creating tasks: building the basic report structure; adding raw computed columns; creating breaks, summaries, and detail areas; and printing or exporting the report. The manual does occasionally resort to technical jargon, but, on the whole, it provides good coverage of most of the basic areas of report creation, with easy-to-understand examples.

The advanced user's guide discusses a mixed bag of ProReports features, including its crosstab capabilities (something I expect most end users will use), report templates (which are used like style sheets to underpin the format of a particular report), a nd ProReports' proprietary expression language (which is similar to a spreadsheet macro language and can be used to post-process returned data sets in a variety of interesting ways). The advanced volume also covers SQL and ProReports' multidatabase query capabilities, which suggests that the ProReports designers expect most end users to build reports that are not based on complex queries but rather on simple table extracts with calculated columns where necessary.

Considering the problems associated with designing and deploying large-scale decision support systems, ProReports elegantly addresses one of the most pressing operational problems associated with intelligent desktops: scaling the number of desktops runni ng any client data access tool from a handful to several hundred. As the number of client applications increases, the operations and management (O&M) problems associated with keeping the clients properly configured increase. There are also difficulties w ith keeping everyone up to date on changes in the databases being accessed. ProReports provides centralized configuration capabilities to remedy this problem.

ProReports lives up to its own marketing literature. ProReports is a true enterprise-ready client/server data access and reporting tool, credible as a desktop database publisher, and particularly strong from configuration and O&M perspectives. With its n ext release, which should include Windows 95 compliance as well as better desktop object model integration, ProReports is a serious contender for end-user reporting. It is also an obvious choice when large-scale deployment issues are a concern. Any firm considering large-scale deployment of a report writer should take a serious look at ProReports.

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