On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, Jason Linhart wrote:
>
> Stephen, do you have any thoughts on this.
Well, I've read this discussion with interest. It touches several issues
which I've thought about previously, although I don't have any definitive
answers as yet. For one thing, I have zero experience with databases, so I
don't really know what I'm talking about. :)
My inclination is to agree with Michael, broadly, when he says:
>
> the space requirements are ridiculous, the processing consumed is
> monumental, and the information thereby won is absolutely essential
> to the management of the company.
>
and again
> I'm not convinced that Analog is the tool for the job
> in this case.
I agree that if you have specific needs, and if you can afford the disk
space/RAM/processing time, a database approach would be more powerful, and
might well be the simplest solution. But I don't feel this is the road which
mainstream analog ought to be going down.
Now I am not denying Jason or Jeremy's claim that everything, or almost
everything, could be replicated by running analog several times, possibly
with a bit of scripting hackery in between. But is that the right solution
for Michael's type of application? I doubt it.
> I can imagine reorganizing the Analog code so that there is a global list
> of report definition records, such that there is no explicit linkage
> between data types and reports. Several of the structures are already
> setup for this, but I'm not clear on all of the implications to other
> parts of Analog.
>
As for extending analog in future to make these type of things easier -- I
have a long-term ambition to write analog so that several reports can be
produced in one run. This would solve many of the problems. The data
structures in version 3 were already chosen with this in mind. But unless
someone's offering me a salary to develop analog full time, I don't know how
soon it will happen.
Several people (including Jason & Jeremy in the current thread) talk about a
more flexible report template. This is an attractive idea. But I'm not quite
sure what such a thing would look like. It's easy to imagine one which
generalises any specific person's requirements. It's not so easy to imagine
one which generalises everyone's requirements simultaneously. :) In any case
it too would require substantial development resources which I don't
currently have.
As I say, these are not carefully thought-out opinions. So feel free to
follow up. I'd be interested to hear other people's views on this.
--
Stephen Turner http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/
Statistical Laboratory, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1SB, England
"8th March 2000. National No Smoking Day. Ash Wednesday." (On a calendar)
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