I need a report tool for postgres. The ideal tool would have these
characteristics:

- Reports, once defined, could be put into a Tcl/Tk menu (or any menu)
and called

- Open source (Free software) preferred for oh so many reasons
(including no budget)

- Tcl/Tk preferred but not essential as long as criterion 1 can be
satisfied

- It would be nice if users could define custom reports

I had hoped that the report facility of pgaccess would do this, but
it's alpha and I can't AFAIK call those reports outside of pgaccess.

TIA for any help.

On 16 Sep 2006 18:02:25 -0700, Lan <lan@falleagle.net> wrote:

> I had hoped that the report facility of pgaccess would do this, but
> it's alpha and I can't AFAIK call those reports outside of pgaccess.
I've successfully used LaTeX with Oracle, and would assume that
similar things can be done with Postgres. But your specs regarding
the KIND of report, and the expected OUTCOME are meager (well,
actually non-existent :}). You can integrate any command with Tcl,
can't you? So ...


Cheers,
Andrej

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Andrej Ricnik-Bay escribió:
>> it's alpha and I can't AFAIK call those reports outside of pgaccess.
> I've successfully used LaTeX with Oracle, and would assume that
> similar things can be done with Postgres.
sorry if this is a foolish question, but would it be possible for you to
give an example? would you generate the report by redirecting queries to
a text file & formatting the file with LaTeX?

Barbara F.
> Cheers,
> Andrej
>
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Oops! "Lan" <lan@falleagle.net> was seen spray-painting on a wall:
> I need a report tool for postgres. The ideal tool would have these
> characteristics:
>
> - Reports, once defined, could be put into a Tcl/Tk menu (or any menu)
> and called
>
> - Open source (Free software) preferred for oh so many reasons
> (including no budget)
>
> - Tcl/Tk preferred but not essential as long as criterion 1 can be
> satisfied
>
> - It would be nice if users could define custom reports
>
> I had hoped that the report facility of pgaccess would do this, but
> it's alpha and I can't AFAIK call those reports outside of pgaccess.

This is, alas, one of the "Holy Grail"-like things where people don't
seem to quite agree on what the best way is.

The nearest thing I'm aware of is JasperReports, which is a Java
thing, findable at SourceForge.

Unfortunately, building a good report writer is a seriously
challenging task. People have generally put together partial answers,
covering limited scopes.

Something really comprehensive is much tougher; here are some of the
challenges that seem typical:

- Visual tools are pretty cool, but they tend to imply "What we allow
you to easily draw is all you can get"

- GUI-ish tools tend to be written with the assumption that you can
always "GUI at" the system; this doesn't fit in well with a need to
run it in production environments where reports can need to get
generated for particular users, and spooled to various possibly
offline destinations.

- It's easy to build tools that work with trivial datasets; it's often
also easy to come up with nontrivial datasets that'll make them blow
up.

I wish I could point to something that "did everything;" the only
example I can think of is SAP's R/3 system, where, as a result of them
spending billions of marks on it, they have something exceeding fancy.
But you need to spend a LOT to get it into place, and it doesn't work
with PostgreSQL...
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am Sat, dem 16.09.2006, um 23:04:35 -0300 mailte barbara figueirido folgendes:
> Andrej Ricnik-Bay escribió:
> >>it's alpha and I can't AFAIK call those reports outside of pgaccess.
> >I've successfully used LaTeX with Oracle, and would assume that
> >similar things can be done with Postgres.
> sorry if this is a foolish question, but would it be possible for you to
> give an example? would you generate the report by redirecting queries to
> a text file & formatting the file with LaTeX?

You can use SQLTeX for this:
http://oveas.com/index.php?Language=...l&set=freeware


Andreas
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Andreas Kretschmer
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GnuPG-ID: 0x3FFF606C, privat 0x7F4584DA http://wwwkeys.de.pgp.net

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