Creating Reports Is Easy with DBxtra

By : Dinesh Asanka Apr 20, 2006

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How many times have you been asked to produce a report in a hurry? As you know, most of the time, management wants a report to be delivered as fast as possible. Sometimes, a simple tabular report just will not do; and it may need to include charts as well.

To help resolve this problem for DBAs, DBxtra, by Quanticus, provides extensive reporting tools that allow you to make reports easily and quickly.

Overview

The main window of DBxtra is divided into three sections. On the left, you'll find projects and connections. You can create several connections to one project. The middle section contains the query pane. From the query pane, you can select tables and fields. The right side has links to the DBxtra web site. This is like on-line help. It would be nice if DBxtra had off-line help, but it doesn't.

DBxtra can connect to multiple database types. This review will consider only SQL Server connections.

Let us assume that you have been asked to generate a report on order details. For this report, you need to link the orders, order details, and customer tables — and maybe the products table as well. It is just a drag-and-drop operation from the projects and connections pane on the left to the middle query pane. Then you can create links between tables.

The ability to drag and drop tables and views from different databases is an important feature. However, it is ideal if these links are auto created by identifying existing foreign keys.

After the drag-and-operation, you have the option of building expressions with a simple user interface.

When saving a query you can set permissions and specify which user groups have access.