Hi Nick!

I've been using SPSS for this purpose for some time, and now it's also
been acquired by IBM. The base program is now called "IBM SPSS
Statistics 19", and traces its lineage back to 1968. The report-writing
facilities are quite easy to use, for either production or ad-hoc
reports. Having all that statistical depth available is a bonus that
I've actually used occasionally.

There are a number of books about data analysis ("business
intelligence") with SPSS from many authors. These can often be found in
the textbook section of a college bookstore.

SPSS' main competitor SAS would also work well for this. Both programs
sit in a market niche where they fit this problem well, and they're much
easier to use than the other solutions for this.

Roger Deschner      University of Illinois at Chicago     rogerd AT uic DOT edu




On Thu, 11 Nov 2010, Nick Laflamme wrote:

>(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