Are ad-hoc query tools less used now?
May 28th, 2007 by Peter Scott
For once I don’t have a strong opinion of my own, so I am seeking your input.
Over the past few years pervasive BI is the big must-have in corporate intelligence systems; that is, making the whole organisation intelligence consumers by giving users performance dashboards and embedding fixed queries into line of business applications. But what of ad-hoc tools? Do workers need tools such as Discoverer or OBIEE Answers in their day-to-day work or do they just drill-down on pre-canned reports in the web browser (or perhaps in a Microsoft shop, Excel)? Of course, there will always be report authors creating the dashboards that will need to use the ad-hoc tools, and others that may be more in to data exploration (and in that case is an ad-hoc tool to limiting).
Off to Edinburgh tomorrow
For the Miracle database forum. And for once I shall be going low-tech - no PDA/mobile phone/laptop so don’t expect a lot of posts in the coming few days - might put up some photos though when I get back if I remember to pack the camera.
May 28th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Over here I’ve found a tendency to use more and more olap-like (!) tools, fed from the DW or DM. Traditional “ad-hoc reporting” and even corporate reporting tools are not as much in demand nowadays. Which is good: I’d welcome ANYTHING that stopped the over reliance on Crystal Reports in this country! The blessed thing is just hopelessly inadequate…
May 30th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Add-hoc reporting is to a large extent a sales pitch from the big commercial BI vendors. There is a limit in complexity beyond which users can no longer build reports for themselves. So these users end up wasting valuable time and sometimes spend more time then before after which the ICT dept need to come in and clean up the mess.
In a lot of cases it’s better to just create a set of standard reports: validated, tested and approved.
Oh, you might say, then why did you guys (Pentaho) create an open source ad-hoc reporting tool yourself? Because in certain situations it’s a very useful thing to have and certain users that know their way around can still get plenty of benefit from it. However, we did opt to make simplicity very important in the creation of the metadata layer so that users don’t get a gazilion objects to chose from. In fact we’re not allowing users to waste time on very complex things.
As always though, things are never black and white and it’s hard to have strong opinions about the topic.
All the best,
Matt