A nice thing about the ELUNA conference is the opportunity to share. During the Systems and Reporting session I attended, it seemed clear that there was enough of an interest in SQL to warrant an interest group, so I agreed to coordinate such a group. Basically, I think people just want a place to share. Luis at Ex Libris has started full-force with this idea by creating a portal to share information. Any Ex Libris customer can share SQL scripts and view other's scripts by creating an account. The portal is located HERE.

I'm excited about this. I think this site will be useful for technical folks for the scripts, but also for users so that they can get ideas of the kinds of reports that are possible with the system. It's clear to me that SQL is the way to go for reporting. Reports on the ARC product at ELUNA were less than encouraging. Lots of problems, slow response time on the data pulls, and many of the data fields just aren't available. It also seems like ARC would really need to be managed centrally to be even remotely useful. Meanwhile, here at PALNI, I think we've been pretty successful so far with automating SQL scripts through the services for basic reports, and its much more flexible.

This will not be the cure-all for our reporting needs though. The real need is for some executive reports. Can we do that through SQL and services? I'm not sure. We may have to massage the data first in PHP to get some really pretty reports out. In my mind though, executive reports and data reports are quite different. Different formats, different data, and different audiences. Executive reports are more summary and look nicer, while data reports for power users need to have more detailed data and there isn't much emphasis on presentation. I think we've got a good start on data reports, and I'm excited that once we start sharing there will be additional possibilities for more reports that I/we haven't even thought about.