On 09/08/2014 11:45 AM, Abelard Hoffman wrote:
Hi Alban.
On Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 4:18 AM, Alban Hertroys <haramrae@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:haramrae@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
On 07 Sep 2014, at 10:45, Abelard Hoffman <abelardhoffman@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:abelardhoffman@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
> For reports, everyone else mostly uses other tools? I'd like to stay away from GUI-tools, if possible.
For reporting, usually you use the data in the database directly.
A TSV or CSV file is not a report, it’s at best a data source for
your report. Going through an intermediate format is not a
particularly effective approach to create reports, but if you have
to (for example because you aren’t _allowed_ access to the
database), generally preferred formats seem to be CSV, XML or JSON;
as long as it’s a standard format.
TSV is not a common choice. Are you sure your boss actually cares
that it’s TSV and not, for example, CSV?
Could you expand on that a bit? What sort of tools does management use
to generate reports from the database directly?
You're meaning a database warehouse? We just have an OLTP db, so we've
always generated reports periodically through cron jobs.
Or maybe "reports" is the wrong word. We generate a bunch of db stats
which can then be used however they want (pulled into Excel, etc.).
But would definitely be interested in learning about other approaches.
Ways I have done it:
1) In Excel use the data tools to run the query and return data directly
to the spreadsheet. This assumes a version of Excel that has the data tools.
2) I use Python, so use psycopg2 to pull data from the database and then
xlwt to write out a spreadsheet or reportlab to create a pdf or the csv
module to create whatever flavor of CSV.
And yes, I'm sure we could convert everything over to CSV. Just an issue
of inertia.
Thanks.
--
Adrian Klaver
adrian.klaver@xxxxxxxxxxx
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