Suggestions for a reporting system

Hi,

We will be developing a management reporting software for a bank. The
user will see reports that get updated in near real time( e.g. every 5
min), with data regarding transaction amounts, etc. across a number of
dimensions such as day, time, region, etc.
The dimensions will be hierarchical in nature. So a zone will have
states and a state will have cities.
The raw data has to be pulled from several different databases, such as
a DB for ATM transactions, another for home loan applications, etc.
It should be easy to add customized reports if a different view of the
data is desired.
Our clients suggest that we use a tool called Clementine developed by
SPSS. But we have the liberty to choose a different tool if that serves
our purpose.
Clementine seems to allow a data flow to be defined which might be of
use to pur project. Does anyone have any idea how this could be
different from SQL server's Data Transformation Services?

Any other thoughts regarding the approach to be taken, will be
appreciated.

Thanks
Yash

Re: Suggestions for a reporting system

Clementine appears to be a Data Mining application so is presumably
more directly comparable to Analysis Services than DTS (DTS is a data
integration tool). I don't have any personal experience of Clementine
though.
http://www.spss.com/clementine

DTS is going away in SQL Server 2005. Integration Services is the new
DTS and is better equipped with features to complement the rest of the
SQL Server BI toolset.

--
David Portas
SQL Server MVP
--

Re: Suggestions for a reporting system

I use DecisionStream by Cognos.
http://www.cognos.com/products/business_intelligence/data_pr eparation/index.html?lid=//Products//Business%20Intelligence //Cognos%20DecisionStream
It can connect to MS SQL, Oracle, text files, ODBC and others. Likewise
I can deliever the data to these connections as well. I've not used any
other ETL tools, so I cant say how it compares to others. However, it
works well for my company.
Support type1 and type2 dimensions (slowly changing dimensions)
surrogate keys, heirarchies and can create metadata for other products
(Cognos' ReportNet and Powerplay).
HTH
Rob

Re: Suggestions for a reporting system

Yash,

First you need to decide where the data will come from your users want to
see, from the operational data base or from a data warehouse kind of thing.
The latter is better for historical views (mixed with your
up-to-real-time-data) and getting data in frequently can be a bit demanding.
For this you need something called ETL-Tool for data extraction. ETL stands
for extraction, transformation, load. You can find several tools in the
market for this and Clementine is none of them. You will find highly
functional and expensive tools like Ascential, Business Objects (Acta),
Informatica, etc. and cheaper ones. Further you need to have an idea what
kind of reporting tool you want your users to use. You will find tools from
Actuate (which is nice for incorporating data from disparate data sources in
reports and very often used in finance institutes), Business Objects (also
ETL tool vendor), Cognos ReportNet (dto.), Hyperion (Performance Suite),
Information Builders (they also have software to incorporate data from
disparate sources, even realtime), MicroStrategy.

Kind regards,
Joerg
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news:1119875329.661449.124990@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com.. .
> Hi,
>
> We will be developing a management reporting software for a bank. The
> user will see reports that get updated in near real time( e.g. every 5
> min), with data regarding transaction amounts, etc. across a number of
> dimensions such as day, time, region, etc.
> The dimensions will be hierarchical in nature. So a zone will have
> states and a state will have cities.
> The raw data has to be pulled from several different databases, such as
> a DB for ATM transactions, another for home loan applications, etc.
> It should be easy to add customized reports if a different view of the
> data is desired.
> Our clients suggest that we use a tool called Clementine developed by
> SPSS. But we have the liberty to choose a different tool if that serves
> our purpose.
> Clementine seems to allow a data flow to be defined which might be of
> use to pur project. Does anyone have any idea how this could be
> different from SQL server's Data Transformation Services?
>
> Any other thoughts regarding the approach to be taken, will be
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks
> Yash
>