Re: reports reports reports
I have done a lot of work with 2005 Reporting Services. I looked at the CFReport tag in CFMX 7 Enterprise and I don't think the CF offering is in the same league as Reporting Services. The cfreport tag seems to just produce PDF reports. The cfreport support for Excel output is so bad that it is worthless. Cfreport does not claim to be able to produce HTML reports. SQL Server Reporting services is harder to set up, harder to learn, and slower, but it does a lot more. With Reporting Services, you can output HTML reports, Excel reports, PDF, TIFF, and pretty much every format you could want. You can schedule reports to run. By HTML reports, what you get are fancy DHTML tables where you can roll-up rows, sort by columns, have sums automatically calculated, etc. The HTML Reporting Services spits out is rather complex and doesn't work well in non-MSIE browsers, but that downside may not be important. From what I have read Crystal Reports produces reports more efficiently than Reporting Services. I would distinguish between charts and reports, where charts are embedded inside of reports. Charts have many possible solutions, whereas with reports, the choices are mainly Crystal Reports, Reporting Services, cfreport, or whatever custom code you create. There may be other reporting solutions. I have not looked around. In summary, if you need reports that are more than just PDF documents, I don't think you can use cfreport. I wish cfreport did more. Specifically, I would like to have an HTML data grid that has rollup rows and automatic sums, like Reporting Services offers. Enjoy, Mike Chabot On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm looking for opinions advice here. My DBA is going nuts over the SQL Server 2005 reporting services. He wants to replace our current custom built (CF) reporting mechanism with it. I think ColdFusion report builder would be a better option since we are, after all, a ColdFusion shop, not .NET. And not to mention all of our production servers run Linux. Nice features our company seems to want often in reports is the ability to sort and filter data, add/remove/re-arrange columns from the report. Keep stats on when the report was last run, by whom, and how long it took. Change the server the report runs off of on the fly. The problem I have is that I know nothing about the SQL Server 2005 reporting service, OR the ColdFusion report builder other than they are all free. A couple of the guys on the database team are already playing around with the SQL version and making a collection of cool reports to use in their argument for why we should use it. Before all the pointy-haired bosses get sold on that I want to make sure ColdFusion report builder gets its fair say. Can anyone with experience with one or the other comment on the following: Which one is faster? Which one is better? Which one has more features when it comes to manipulating the data after running the report? Which one will get my morning coffee and bagel for me? Which one has the easiest learning curve? I anxiously await advice. Thanks! ~Brad ~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:255475 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
RE: reports reports reports
Mike, Thank you for the insight. ~Brad -Original Message- From: Mike Chabot [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 12:45 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports I have done a lot of work with 2005 Reporting Services. I looked at the CFReport tag in CFMX 7 Enterprise and I don't think the CF offering is in the same league as Reporting Services. The cfreport tag seems to just produce PDF reports. The cfreport support for Excel output is so bad that it is worthless. Cfreport does not claim to be able to produce HTML reports. SQL Server Reporting services is harder to set up, harder to learn, and slower, but it does a lot more. With Reporting Services, you can output HTML reports, Excel reports, PDF, TIFF, and pretty much every format you could want. You can schedule reports to run. By HTML reports, what you get are fancy DHTML tables where you can roll-up rows, sort by columns, have sums automatically calculated, etc. The HTML Reporting Services spits out is rather complex and doesn't work well in non-MSIE browsers, but that downside may not be important. From what I have read Crystal Reports produces reports more efficiently than Reporting Services. I would distinguish between charts and reports, where charts are embedded inside of reports. Charts have many possible solutions, whereas with reports, the choices are mainly Crystal Reports, Reporting Services, cfreport, or whatever custom code you create. There may be other reporting solutions. I have not looked around. In summary, if you need reports that are more than just PDF documents, I don't think you can use cfreport. I wish cfreport did more. Specifically, I would like to have an HTML data grid that has rollup rows and automatic sums, like Reporting Services offers. Enjoy, Mike Chabot On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm looking for opinions advice here. My DBA is going nuts over the SQL Server 2005 reporting services. He wants to replace our current custom built (CF) reporting mechanism with it. I think ColdFusion report builder would be a better option since we are, after all, a ColdFusion shop, not .NET. And not to mention all of our production servers run Linux. Nice features our company seems to want often in reports is the ability to sort and filter data, add/remove/re-arrange columns from the report. Keep stats on when the report was last run, by whom, and how long it took. Change the server the report runs off of on the fly. The problem I have is that I know nothing about the SQL Server 2005 reporting service, OR the ColdFusion report builder other than they are all free. A couple of the guys on the database team are already playing around with the SQL version and making a collection of cool reports to use in their argument for why we should use it. Before all the pointy-haired bosses get sold on that I want to make sure ColdFusion report builder gets its fair say. Can anyone with experience with one or the other comment on the following: Which one is faster? Which one is better? Which one has more features when it comes to manipulating the data after running the report? Which one will get my morning coffee and bagel for me? Which one has the easiest learning curve? I anxiously await advice. Thanks! ~Brad ~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:255493 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
Re: reports reports reports
Ok, I guess I was kidding about community. Later[1], I swear. I'd also take a look at ^JasperReports --as a personal fave, it rocks--. I'm not impartial or unbiased though, I honestly mostly just like the feeling I get from the community and software. It's a robust solution for many reporting needs, and is java based, so it's like, niftyer than a specific OS, or whathave you. The report builder is awesome, and it can use hibernate, xml, jdbc... whatever you want to use, pretty much. I really dig it. Obviously. And they've got a server, and other stuff now that I am eager to some day play with. If you or others[2] need help, I can try- as I use it, and like it. [1] although I think I may have implied I was going to do it then, I didn't say so, did I? [2] I just put this here so I could use the numbers[3] instead of the star- er- Astrix. [3] Or I coulda double starred it... now that I thinkabout it, numbers aren't appropriate, maybe. Heh. to take exclusive possession of... yeah, that's the word I meant. :Denny ~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:255589 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
Re: reports reports reports
Brad, The question here is why do you feel that ColdFusion needs to do the reporting? Is the data set ideal for CF? In the server farm that I work with, we have dozens upon dozens of database and multiple data warehouses. We use the report builder for SQL Server 2000 and it is quick and gets the reports to those who need it. The SQL Server reports also have an option to deploy the calculated report to an HTML page, which is a static result of the finished compilation. Now, don't get me wrong here. I have used CF for 8 years and use it for the majority of my solutions, but it is not meant to report everything. You have to think about CF connecting to the servers you want to run reports on as additional network overhead. You can create static reports in CF as well and can offer lots of pretty graphing options. You can go as far as building a Flex Charting solution as well for even better results. I would recommend Flex Charts over CF Reports for more options and flexibility. Now, who is going to build these reports? Are they asking you to create the reports or the DBAs? Is job security a concern? Just be objective here and figure out what is the best option instead of asking if CF should get the oppurtunity. From what I have seen on the calculations for some of the larger reports, the SQL report builder is quicker on the recompilation of a report. CF is quicker when rendering aggregated data sets that do not need to recompile the data sets. Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm looking for opinions advice here. My DBA is going nuts over the SQL Server 2005 reporting services. He wants to replace our current custom built (CF) reporting mechanism with it. I think ColdFusion report builder would be a better option since we are, after all, a ColdFusion shop, not .NET. And not to mention all of our production servers run Linux. Nice features our company seems to want often in reports is the ability to sort and filter data, add/remove/re-arrange columns from the report. Keep stats on when the report was last run, by whom, and how long it took. Change the server the report runs off of on the fly. The problem I have is that I know nothing about the SQL Server 2005 reporting service, OR the ColdFusion report builder other than they are all free. A couple of the guys on the database team are already playing around with the SQL version and making a collection of cool reports to use in their argument for why we should use it. Before all the pointy-haired bosses get sold on that I want to make sure ColdFusion report builder gets its fair say. Can anyone with experience with one or the other comment on the following: Which one is faster? Which one is better? Which one has more features when it comes to manipulating the data after running the report? Which one will get my morning coffee and bagel for me? Which one has the easiest learning curve? I anxiously await advice. Thanks! ~Brad ~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:255223 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
RE: reports reports reports
I believe the question being asked here is really: In a Linux based CF/Java environment with a SQL Server back end, would it be better to extend our current custom reporting solution in ColdFusion using CF Reports or is SQL 2005 Reporting Services the better option. If SQL 2005 Reporting Services are a better option, we could off load that functionality and purchase a couple of windows servers (we run all Linux now) and get .Net up and running for those sections. Then we run into questions as to integrating our current security model etc. But we could head down that road if the SQL solution is that much better than CF Report. We were hoping to tap into the collective consciousness of this list and come up with a better idea without months of research, case studies and prototypes. If anyone has worked with either/both of these services and/or has an opinion for or against either, we'd appreciate your input. Thanks! Christine Davis ColdFusion Lead Nations Technical Services Prairie Village, KS 913-748-8044 ext 4703 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 12:47 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, The question here is why do you feel that ColdFusion needs to do the reporting? Is the data set ideal for CF? In the server farm that I work with, we have dozens upon dozens of database and multiple data warehouses. We use the report builder for SQL Server 2000 and it is quick and gets the reports to those who need it. The SQL Server reports also have an option to deploy the calculated report to an HTML page, which is a static result of the finished compilation. Now, don't get me wrong here. I have used CF for 8 years and use it for the majority of my solutions, but it is not meant to report everything. You have to think about CF connecting to the servers you want to run reports on as additional network overhead. You can create static reports in CF as well and can offer lots of pretty graphing options. You can go as far as building a Flex Charting solution as well for even better results. I would recommend Flex Charts over CF Reports for more options and flexibility. Now, who is going to build these reports? Are they asking you to create the reports or the DBAs? Is job security a concern? Just be objective here and figure out what is the best option instead of asking if CF should get the oppurtunity. From what I have seen on the calculations for some of the larger reports, the SQL report builder is quicker on the recompilation of a report. CF is quicker when rendering aggregated data sets that do not need to recompile the data sets. Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm looking for opinions advice here. My DBA is going nuts over the SQL Server 2005 reporting services. He wants to replace our current custom built (CF) reporting mechanism with it. I think ColdFusion report builder would be a better option since we are, after all, a ColdFusion shop, not .NET. And not to mention all of our production servers run Linux. Nice features our company seems to want often in reports is the ability to sort and filter data, add/remove/re-arrange columns from the report. Keep stats on when the report was last run, by whom, and how long it took. Change the server the report runs off of on the fly. The problem I have is that I know nothing about the SQL Server 2005 reporting service, OR the ColdFusion report builder other than they are all free. A couple of the guys on the database team are already playing around with the SQL version and making a collection of cool reports to use in their argument for why we should use it. Before all the pointy-haired bosses get sold on that I want to make sure ColdFusion report builder gets its fair say. Can anyone with experience with one or the other comment on the following: Which one is faster? Which one is better? Which one has more features when it comes to manipulating the data after running the report? Which one will get my morning coffee and bagel for me? Which one has the easiest learning curve? I anxiously await advice. Thanks! ~Brad ~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:255224 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
RE: reports reports reports
Teddy, thanks for the insight. I will try to address a couple of the questions you posed... I guess the main reason why I am suggesting CF would be the logical solutions for our reporting is simply because all of our other interfaces we have right now are CF. All operations functionality (including the current reporting module) is part of a CF front-end / MS SQL back-end web app. Our current set of programmers are CF programmers, our front-end expertise is CF, and our current servers are Linux (I.E. .Net is limited in my mind since it is married to its platform). All logins, authentication, tracking, and Contact manager data (which the reports link directly to) are all part of the CF web app. So in my mind, it just seems logical that to change technologies would be a shift in gears for our company. It would also cause a rift in our technologies where integrating links directly to order details and contact manager would be across systems. Also, we would have to re-build our security model and a new authentication system for a second web app written in a different language. It just sounds like so much work! :) You mention that there is network overhead for CF to connect to the SQL servers to run the report. That makes perfect sense, but wouldn't you have just as much overhead for a SQL reporting server to also connect to the database? Maybe I don't understand how the SQL server connects to the database, but it is still a separate server connecting across the network to your database to run a select or a prepared statement, right? I am especially interested in hearing from anyone who has used any of the Flex charting stuff. I am curious as to how hard it is to create them. Job security is not a concern here. I'm just trying to keep my company from chasing after every pretty technology butterfly it sees and ending up with 15 different technologies which are all poorly integrated or thought through. (But, yes, I may be a little selfish in wanting things to stay in CF) :) Some of my main concerns with our reporting mechanism are having the flexibility we currently have with the HTML/CF interface we are using-- especially if we move to a Flex solution. All of our reports have dynamic criteria the user can select as they run the report. The interface needs to be able to create form fields of every type, exact validation against those fields, and then capture their values and plug them in to the query that is run to populate the report. I don't know if that can be does easily with action script even. Anyway, enough rambling. I KNOW there are some people out there with opinions/experience in this area. Nobody would shut up about the cfif recordcount, and now I can't get anyone to talk! lol ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 12:47 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, The question here is why do you feel that ColdFusion needs to do the reporting? Is the data set ideal for CF? In the server farm that I work with, we have dozens upon dozens of database and multiple data warehouses. We use the report builder for SQL Server 2000 and it is quick and gets the reports to those who need it. The SQL Server reports also have an option to deploy the calculated report to an HTML page, which is a static result of the finished compilation. Now, don't get me wrong here. I have used CF for 8 years and use it for the majority of my solutions, but it is not meant to report everything. You have to think about CF connecting to the servers you want to run reports on as additional network overhead. You can create static reports in CF as well and can offer lots of pretty graphing options. You can go as far as building a Flex Charting solution as well for even better results. I would recommend Flex Charts over CF Reports for more options and flexibility. Now, who is going to build these reports? Are they asking you to create the reports or the DBAs? Is job security a concern? Just be objective here and figure out what is the best option instead of asking if CF should get the oppurtunity. From what I have seen on the calculations for some of the larger reports, the SQL report builder is quicker on the recompilation of a report. CF is quicker when rendering aggregated data sets that do not need to recompile the data sets. Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm looking for opinions advice here. My DBA is going nuts over the SQL Server 2005 reporting services. He wants to replace our current custom built (CF) reporting mechanism with it. I think ColdFusion report builder would be a better option since we are, after all, a ColdFusion shop, not .NET. And not to mention all of our production servers run Linux. Nice features our company seems to want often in reports is the ability to sort and filter data, add/remove/re-arrange columns from the report. Keep stats on when
Re: reports reports reports
Brad, No worries. How often are these reports going to be rendered? What size of a data set will they be calculated upon? As for Flex reporting, here is an example site: http://demo.quietlyscheming.com/ChartSampler/app.html The code for the report demos are downloadable from: http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/2006/08/30/all-flex-samples-on-quietlyscheming-updated-and-now-downloadable/ Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Teddy, thanks for the insight. I will try to address a couple of the questions you posed... I guess the main reason why I am suggesting CF would be the logical solutions for our reporting is simply because all of our other interfaces we have right now are CF. All operations functionality (including the current reporting module) is part of a CF front-end / MS SQL back-end web app. Our current set of programmers are CF programmers, our front-end expertise is CF, and our current servers are Linux (I.E. .Net is limited in my mind since it is married to its platform). All logins, authentication, tracking, and Contact manager data (which the reports link directly to) are all part of the CF web app. So in my mind, it just seems logical that to change technologies would be a shift in gears for our company. It would also cause a rift in our technologies where integrating links directly to order details and contact manager would be across systems. Also, we would have to re-build our security model and a new authentication system for a second web app written in a different language. It just sounds like so much work! :) You mention that there is network overhead for CF to connect to the SQL servers to run the report. That makes perfect sense, but wouldn't you have just as much overhead for a SQL reporting server to also connect to the database? Maybe I don't understand how the SQL server connects to the database, but it is still a separate server connecting across the network to your database to run a select or a prepared statement, right? I am especially interested in hearing from anyone who has used any of the Flex charting stuff. I am curious as to how hard it is to create them. Job security is not a concern here. I'm just trying to keep my company from chasing after every pretty technology butterfly it sees and ending up with 15 different technologies which are all poorly integrated or thought through. (But, yes, I may be a little selfish in wanting things to stay in CF) :) Some of my main concerns with our reporting mechanism are having the flexibility we currently have with the HTML/CF interface we are using-- especially if we move to a Flex solution. All of our reports have dynamic criteria the user can select as they run the report. The interface needs to be able to create form fields of every type, exact validation against those fields, and then capture their values and plug them in to the query that is run to populate the report. I don't know if that can be does easily with action script even. Anyway, enough rambling. I KNOW there are some people out there with opinions/experience in this area. Nobody would shut up about the cfif recordcount, and now I can't get anyone to talk! lol ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 12:47 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, The question here is why do you feel that ColdFusion needs to do the reporting? Is the data set ideal for CF? In the server farm that I work with, we have dozens upon dozens of database and multiple data warehouses. We use the report builder for SQL Server 2000 and it is quick and gets the reports to those who need it. The SQL Server reports also have an option to deploy the calculated report to an HTML page, which is a static result of the finished compilation. Now, don't get me wrong here. I have used CF for 8 years and use it for the majority of my solutions, but it is not meant to report everything. You have to think about CF connecting to the servers you want to run reports on as additional network overhead. You can create static reports in CF as well and can offer lots of pretty graphing options. You can go as far as building a Flex Charting solution as well for even better results. I would recommend Flex Charts over CF Reports for more options and flexibility. Now, who is going to build these reports? Are they asking you to create the reports or the DBAs? Is job security a concern? Just be objective here and figure out what is the best option instead of asking if CF should get the oppurtunity. From what I have seen on the calculations for some of the larger reports, the SQL report builder is quicker on the recompilation of a report. CF is quicker when rendering aggregated data sets that do not need to recompile the data sets. Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote
RE: reports reports reports
Thanks for the links. These reports are rendered hundreds of times a day for all our companies. Even more so at month end. People (executives) here like their reports! Mostly customer volumes, turn times, client profitability kind of stuff. As far as the dataset... Anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of records are being looked at for each report. The actual amount of data returned is usually aggregated in some way, but is usually in hundreds to thousands of records returned. ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 2:12 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, No worries. How often are these reports going to be rendered? What size of a data set will they be calculated upon? As for Flex reporting, here is an example site: http://demo.quietlyscheming.com/ChartSampler/app.html The code for the report demos are downloadable from: http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/2006/08/30/all-flex-samples-on-quiet lyscheming-updated-and-now-downloadable/ Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Teddy, thanks for the insight. I will try to address a couple of the questions you posed... I guess the main reason why I am suggesting CF would be the logical solutions for our reporting is simply because all of our other interfaces we have right now are CF. All operations functionality (including the current reporting module) is part of a CF front-end / MS SQL back-end web app. Our current set of programmers are CF programmers, our front-end expertise is CF, and our current servers are Linux (I.E. .Net is limited in my mind since it is married to its platform). All logins, authentication, tracking, and Contact manager data (which the reports link directly to) are all part of the CF web app. So in my mind, it just seems logical that to change technologies would be a shift in gears for our company. It would also cause a rift in our technologies where integrating links directly to order details and contact manager would be across systems. Also, we would have to re-build our security model and a new authentication system for a second web app written in a different language. It just sounds like so much work! :) You mention that there is network overhead for CF to connect to the SQL servers to run the report. That makes perfect sense, but wouldn't you have just as much overhead for a SQL reporting server to also connect to the database? Maybe I don't understand how the SQL server connects to the database, but it is still a separate server connecting across the network to your database to run a select or a prepared statement, right? I am especially interested in hearing from anyone who has used any of the Flex charting stuff. I am curious as to how hard it is to create them. Job security is not a concern here. I'm just trying to keep my company from chasing after every pretty technology butterfly it sees and ending up with 15 different technologies which are all poorly integrated or thought through. (But, yes, I may be a little selfish in wanting things to stay in CF) :) Some of my main concerns with our reporting mechanism are having the flexibility we currently have with the HTML/CF interface we are using-- especially if we move to a Flex solution. All of our reports have dynamic criteria the user can select as they run the report. The interface needs to be able to create form fields of every type, exact validation against those fields, and then capture their values and plug them in to the query that is run to populate the report. I don't know if that can be does easily with action script even. Anyway, enough rambling. I KNOW there are some people out there with opinions/experience in this area. Nobody would shut up about the cfif recordcount, and now I can't get anyone to talk! lol ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 12:47 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, The question here is why do you feel that ColdFusion needs to do the reporting? Is the data set ideal for CF? In the server farm that I work with, we have dozens upon dozens of database and multiple data warehouses. We use the report builder for SQL Server 2000 and it is quick and gets the reports to those who need it. The SQL Server reports also have an option to deploy the calculated report to an HTML page, which is a static result of the finished compilation. Now, don't get me wrong here. I have used CF for 8 years and use it for the majority of my solutions, but it is not meant to report everything. You have to think about CF connecting to the servers you want to run reports on as additional network overhead. You can create static reports in CF as well and can offer lots of pretty graphing options. You can go as far as building a Flex Charting
RE: reports reports reports
Tell me if I am wrong, but cant you just cfhttp with CF to the simple SQL reports and dump em back to the user? Maybe you could use your nice CF login / security and still make use of SQL reporting. I have tinkered with SQL2005 reporting, and I can tell you it looks totally awesome for simple reports with structured repeating regions, but more complex logic would probably be better embedded in CF, imho. Chris -Original Message- From: Brad Wood [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 3:01 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: RE: reports reports reports Teddy, thanks for the insight. I will try to address a couple of the questions you posed... I guess the main reason why I am suggesting CF would be the logical solutions for our reporting is simply because all of our other interfaces we have right now are CF. All operations functionality (including the current reporting module) is part of a CF front-end / MS SQL back-end web app. Our current set of programmers are CF programmers, our front-end expertise is CF, and our current servers are Linux (I.E. .Net is limited in my mind since it is married to its platform). All logins, authentication, tracking, and Contact manager data (which the reports link directly to) are all part of the CF web app. So in my mind, it just seems logical that to change technologies would be a shift in gears for our company. It would also cause a rift in our technologies where integrating links directly to order details and contact manager would be across systems. Also, we would have to re-build our security model and a new authentication system for a second web app written in a different language. It just sounds like so much work! :) You mention that there is network overhead for CF to connect to the SQL servers to run the report. That makes perfect sense, but wouldn't you have just as much overhead for a SQL reporting server to also connect to the database? Maybe I don't understand how the SQL server connects to the database, but it is still a separate server connecting across the network to your database to run a select or a prepared statement, right? I am especially interested in hearing from anyone who has used any of the Flex charting stuff. I am curious as to how hard it is to create them. Job security is not a concern here. I'm just trying to keep my company from chasing after every pretty technology butterfly it sees and ending up with 15 different technologies which are all poorly integrated or thought through. (But, yes, I may be a little selfish in wanting things to stay in CF) :) Some of my main concerns with our reporting mechanism are having the flexibility we currently have with the HTML/CF interface we are using-- especially if we move to a Flex solution. All of our reports have dynamic criteria the user can select as they run the report. The interface needs to be able to create form fields of every type, exact validation against those fields, and then capture their values and plug them in to the query that is run to populate the report. I don't know if that can be does easily with action script even. Anyway, enough rambling. I KNOW there are some people out there with opinions/experience in this area. Nobody would shut up about the cfif recordcount, and now I can't get anyone to talk! lol ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 12:47 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, The question here is why do you feel that ColdFusion needs to do the reporting? Is the data set ideal for CF? In the server farm that I work with, we have dozens upon dozens of database and multiple data warehouses. We use the report builder for SQL Server 2000 and it is quick and gets the reports to those who need it. The SQL Server reports also have an option to deploy the calculated report to an HTML page, which is a static result of the finished compilation. Now, don't get me wrong here. I have used CF for 8 years and use it for the majority of my solutions, but it is not meant to report everything. You have to think about CF connecting to the servers you want to run reports on as additional network overhead. You can create static reports in CF as well and can offer lots of pretty graphing options. You can go as far as building a Flex Charting solution as well for even better results. I would recommend Flex Charts over CF Reports for more options and flexibility. Now, who is going to build these reports? Are they asking you to create the reports or the DBAs? Is job security a concern? Just be objective here and figure out what is the best option instead of asking if CF should get the oppurtunity. From what I have seen on the calculations for some of the larger reports, the SQL report builder is quicker on the recompilation of a report. CF is quicker when rendering aggregated data sets that do not need to recompile the data sets. Teddy On 10/3
RE: reports reports reports
Tell me if I am wrong, but cant you just cfhttp with CF to the simple SQL reports and dump em back to the user? Maybe you could use your nice CF login / security and still make use of SQL reporting. I have tinkered with SQL2005 reporting, and I can tell you it looks totally awesome for simple reports with structured repeating regions, but more complex logic would probably be better embedded in CF, imho. Chris ~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:255243 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
Re: reports reports reports
Brad, Hundreds of thousands is not that bad if you use stord procedures and a good indexing scheme. Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks for the links. These reports are rendered hundreds of times a day for all our companies. Even more so at month end. People (executives) here like their reports! Mostly customer volumes, turn times, client profitability kind of stuff. As far as the dataset... Anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of records are being looked at for each report. The actual amount of data returned is usually aggregated in some way, but is usually in hundreds to thousands of records returned. ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 2:12 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, No worries. How often are these reports going to be rendered? What size of a data set will they be calculated upon? As for Flex reporting, here is an example site: http://demo.quietlyscheming.com/ChartSampler/app.html The code for the report demos are downloadable from: http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/2006/08/30/all-flex-samples-on-quiet lyscheming-updated-and-now-downloadable/ Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Teddy, thanks for the insight. I will try to address a couple of the questions you posed... I guess the main reason why I am suggesting CF would be the logical solutions for our reporting is simply because all of our other interfaces we have right now are CF. All operations functionality (including the current reporting module) is part of a CF front-end / MS SQL back-end web app. Our current set of programmers are CF programmers, our front-end expertise is CF, and our current servers are Linux (I.E. .Net is limited in my mind since it is married to its platform). All logins, authentication, tracking, and Contact manager data (which the reports link directly to) are all part of the CF web app. So in my mind, it just seems logical that to change technologies would be a shift in gears for our company. It would also cause a rift in our technologies where integrating links directly to order details and contact manager would be across systems. Also, we would have to re-build our security model and a new authentication system for a second web app written in a different language. It just sounds like so much work! :) You mention that there is network overhead for CF to connect to the SQL servers to run the report. That makes perfect sense, but wouldn't you have just as much overhead for a SQL reporting server to also connect to the database? Maybe I don't understand how the SQL server connects to the database, but it is still a separate server connecting across the network to your database to run a select or a prepared statement, right? I am especially interested in hearing from anyone who has used any of the Flex charting stuff. I am curious as to how hard it is to create them. Job security is not a concern here. I'm just trying to keep my company from chasing after every pretty technology butterfly it sees and ending up with 15 different technologies which are all poorly integrated or thought through. (But, yes, I may be a little selfish in wanting things to stay in CF) :) Some of my main concerns with our reporting mechanism are having the flexibility we currently have with the HTML/CF interface we are using-- especially if we move to a Flex solution. All of our reports have dynamic criteria the user can select as they run the report. The interface needs to be able to create form fields of every type, exact validation against those fields, and then capture their values and plug them in to the query that is run to populate the report. I don't know if that can be does easily with action script even. Anyway, enough rambling. I KNOW there are some people out there with opinions/experience in this area. Nobody would shut up about the cfif recordcount, and now I can't get anyone to talk! lol ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 12:47 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, The question here is why do you feel that ColdFusion needs to do the reporting? Is the data set ideal for CF? In the server farm that I work with, we have dozens upon dozens of database and multiple data warehouses. We use the report builder for SQL Server 2000 and it is quick and gets the reports to those who need it. The SQL Server reports also have an option to deploy the calculated report to an HTML page, which is a static result of the finished compilation. Now, don't get me wrong here. I have used CF for 8 years and use it for the majority of my solutions, but it is not meant to report
RE: reports reports reports
We do use stored procs for all interaction with the database. We are a no inline queries allowed shop. :) We also add indexes where possible and beneficial. Some of reports still run for ten minutes though. ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 2:36 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, Hundreds of thousands is not that bad if you use stord procedures and a good indexing scheme. Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks for the links. These reports are rendered hundreds of times a day for all our companies. Even more so at month end. People (executives) here like their reports! Mostly customer volumes, turn times, client profitability kind of stuff. As far as the dataset... Anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of records are being looked at for each report. The actual amount of data returned is usually aggregated in some way, but is usually in hundreds to thousands of records returned. ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 2:12 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, No worries. How often are these reports going to be rendered? What size of a data set will they be calculated upon? As for Flex reporting, here is an example site: http://demo.quietlyscheming.com/ChartSampler/app.html The code for the report demos are downloadable from: http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/2006/08/30/all-flex-samples-on-quiet lyscheming-updated-and-now-downloadable/ Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Teddy, thanks for the insight. I will try to address a couple of the questions you posed... I guess the main reason why I am suggesting CF would be the logical solutions for our reporting is simply because all of our other interfaces we have right now are CF. All operations functionality (including the current reporting module) is part of a CF front-end / MS SQL back-end web app. Our current set of programmers are CF programmers, our front-end expertise is CF, and our current servers are Linux (I.E. .Net is limited in my mind since it is married to its platform). All logins, authentication, tracking, and Contact manager data (which the reports link directly to) are all part of the CF web app. So in my mind, it just seems logical that to change technologies would be a shift in gears for our company. It would also cause a rift in our technologies where integrating links directly to order details and contact manager would be across systems. Also, we would have to re-build our security model and a new authentication system for a second web app written in a different language. It just sounds like so much work! :) You mention that there is network overhead for CF to connect to the SQL servers to run the report. That makes perfect sense, but wouldn't you have just as much overhead for a SQL reporting server to also connect to the database? Maybe I don't understand how the SQL server connects to the database, but it is still a separate server connecting across the network to your database to run a select or a prepared statement, right? I am especially interested in hearing from anyone who has used any of the Flex charting stuff. I am curious as to how hard it is to create them. Job security is not a concern here. I'm just trying to keep my company from chasing after every pretty technology butterfly it sees and ending up with 15 different technologies which are all poorly integrated or thought through. (But, yes, I may be a little selfish in wanting things to stay in CF) :) Some of my main concerns with our reporting mechanism are having the flexibility we currently have with the HTML/CF interface we are using-- especially if we move to a Flex solution. All of our reports have dynamic criteria the user can select as they run the report. The interface needs to be able to create form fields of every type, exact validation against those fields, and then capture their values and plug them in to the query that is run to populate the report. I don't know if that can be does easily with action script even. Anyway, enough rambling. I KNOW there are some people out there with opinions/experience in this area. Nobody would shut up about the cfif recordcount, and now I can't get anyone to talk! lol ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 12:47 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, The question here is why do you feel that ColdFusion needs to do the reporting? Is the data set ideal for CF? In the server farm that I work with, we have dozens upon dozens of database and multiple data warehouses. We use the report builder
Re: reports reports reports
10 minutes is a candidate for an aggregate solution somewhere. I use DTS packages to schedule my aggregate reports to merge millions to tens of thousands as needed for a given report. I feel for you man. A 6000+ second timeout is brutal. Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We do use stored procs for all interaction with the database. We are a no inline queries allowed shop. :) We also add indexes where possible and beneficial. Some of reports still run for ten minutes though. ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 2:36 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, Hundreds of thousands is not that bad if you use stord procedures and a good indexing scheme. Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks for the links. These reports are rendered hundreds of times a day for all our companies. Even more so at month end. People (executives) here like their reports! Mostly customer volumes, turn times, client profitability kind of stuff. As far as the dataset... Anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of records are being looked at for each report. The actual amount of data returned is usually aggregated in some way, but is usually in hundreds to thousands of records returned. ~Brad -Original Message- From: Teddy Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 2:12 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: reports reports reports Brad, No worries. How often are these reports going to be rendered? What size of a data set will they be calculated upon? As for Flex reporting, here is an example site: http://demo.quietlyscheming.com/ChartSampler/app.html The code for the report demos are downloadable from: http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/2006/08/30/all-flex-samples-on-quiet lyscheming-updated-and-now-downloadable/ Teddy On 10/3/06, Brad Wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Teddy, thanks for the insight. I will try to address a couple of the questions you posed... I guess the main reason why I am suggesting CF would be the logical solutions for our reporting is simply because all of our other interfaces we have right now are CF. All operations functionality (including the current reporting module) is part of a CF front-end / MS SQL back-end web app. Our current set of programmers are CF programmers, our front-end expertise is CF, and our current servers are Linux (I.E. .Net is limited in my mind since it is married to its platform). All logins, authentication, tracking, and Contact manager data (which the reports link directly to) are all part of the CF web app. So in my mind, it just seems logical that to change technologies would be a shift in gears for our company. It would also cause a rift in our technologies where integrating links directly to order details and contact manager would be across systems. Also, we would have to re-build our security model and a new authentication system for a second web app written in a different language. It just sounds like so much work! :) You mention that there is network overhead for CF to connect to the SQL servers to run the report. That makes perfect sense, but wouldn't you have just as much overhead for a SQL reporting server to also connect to the database? Maybe I don't understand how the SQL server connects to the database, but it is still a separate server connecting across the network to your database to run a select or a prepared statement, right? I am especially interested in hearing from anyone who has used any of the Flex charting stuff. I am curious as to how hard it is to create them. Job security is not a concern here. I'm just trying to keep my company from chasing after every pretty technology butterfly it sees and ending up with 15 different technologies which are all poorly integrated or thought through. (But, yes, I may be a little selfish in wanting things to stay in CF) :) Some of my main concerns with our reporting mechanism are having the flexibility we currently have with the HTML/CF interface we are using-- especially if we move to a Flex solution. All of our reports have dynamic criteria the user can select as they run the report. The interface needs to be able to create form fields of every type, exact validation against those fields, and then capture their values and plug them in to the query that is run to populate the report. I don't know if that can be does easily with action script even. Anyway, enough rambling. I KNOW there are some people out there with opinions/experience in this area. Nobody would shut up about the cfif recordcount, and now I can't get anyone to talk! lol ~Brad
