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

  1. List of all tables
  2. All relationships between table
  3. 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.