Now that I think of it - the report design dilemma

I am no technology buff. So any esoteric conversation you have with me about the pros and cons of traditional RDBMS vs. newer DBMS architectures will most likely be a very short one. There will be a lot of silent nodding and quiet chin rubbing. Luddite though I be, I do profess to know a winner when I see one and QlikView from QlikTech, one of WorldAPP’s premier integration partners in the BI space, appears to be a monster by any estimation.

Boris Evelson, who writes for Information Management Magazine, has written an erudite blog on this, and, though I paraphrase it here, I urge you to read his brilliant homily in full. I even enjoyed the parts I didn't understand.

In essence, Evelson's treatise lowers the boom on the mile-wide gap between BI tools that require you to know in advance exactly what kind of reports you want in a report (in his parlance this is known as pre-discovery of data, aka data integration and data modeling) and BI tools, like QlikView, that allow you to create virtual data models on-the-fly because everything is already indexed in memory.

The advantages of the latter are easy to grasp by anyone who has just delivered a report to spec only to hear a C level mandariin mumur "I'd like to see this data another way".

To his credit, Evelson is even-handed in his analysis and points out other issues that still need resolution, but it certainly looks like any IDEAS (Integrated Data Engineering Applications) that WorldAPP builds for our customers using QlikView's BI engine is going to serve them very well in the future.

Evelson's article can be found at:
http://www.information-management.com/blogs/business_intelligence_bi-10015454-1.htmlce_bi-10015454-1.html