(skip ahead to the phrase "problem statement" if this e-mail looks too long but 
you still care.)

Prologue: My current shop prefers to use EMC's Data Protection Advisor product 
to do our TSM reports and data collection for trend analysis. Several of us who 
have very technical backgrounds (think of former VM System Programmers and the 
like) are baffled by this tool and by its documentation, but someone seeing the 
DPA report "writing" interface remarked that it looked like almost any 4GL 
report writing tool. 

For various reasons, I started looking at what's bundled with TSM Version 6 and 
came across some references to having to use the open source BIRT package, part 
of the Eclipse project, to write custom reports if you want to do other things 
with Tivoli Monitoring than the 18(?) canned reports included with TSM V6. 

Meanwhile, a visiting IBM/Tivoli expert commented casually that since IBM 
bought Cognos, and Cognos is all about writing reports, so don't get too 
heavily invested in BIRT, and expect Cognos to become the report writing tool 
"eventually." Google searchs on "Cognos" quickly starting screaming, "business 
intelligence!"

All of this leaves me thinking, "Business intelligence? I just want some very 
specific reports!" I'm sure there's a lot of specialization and a lot of very 
specific skills in business intelligence, or data mining, or what not, and I'm 
not trying to learn all of that. But I guess I need to know "enough," and 
"enough" is usually more than you expect. 

Problem statement: Does anyone know of a set of books (think O'Reilly and 
Associates more than books For Dummies) that will get me competent at 4 GL 
report writing? I figure it's going to take some XML sooner or later. I know 
these tools all use stand-alone databases such as SQL Server or DB2, but I'm 
not sure generalized those APIs are or how invested I have to be with those. I 
basically want to develop my own mental toolkit for pulling trend data, 
filtering it to weed out known anomalies, and then present it "fifteen ways 
before Sunday." In other words, all the things I'd do with it in Excel if it 
were a simple raw text file instead of a set of tables on a DB server I didn't 
set up and am not too familiar with.

Barring a variety of books, maybe some formal training would point me in the 
right direction, but the books budget is healthier than the training budget for 
now. 

Thanks,
Nick