In researching for B.I tools to be used at work, that could suite our needs I quickly found out a miss conception….there isn’t a plug and play reporting tool. SQL Reporting services, Endeca analytics, cognus ….all require a lot of work to setup.
Now lets say i want to create a small and very simple reporting tool with drill downs. What would i have to know to get the base up.
Base list
- List of all tables
- All relationships between table
- If relationships could be marked as graph it would be useful to know top level parents…and the Nth level children.
So if we construct a database with all Primary and Foreign keys set correctly, steps 1 & 2 we can extract from the database catalog.
Part 3 should be taken care of when we start putting entires into the graph.