Thank you to all,
Dawn with the time and effort you spent here, and Larry for the extra
insight. I learn so much just reading what you folks post. I will revamp
my whole thought of creating these reports with extended computations, and
do the work previous to the report. That just makes so much sense. I was
hoping for a quick fix, but heh heh, that just isn't always possible. And
Dr. R... yep, I know... I could do it if we were using the latest and
greatest! Someday hopefully.
Dan
At 10:57 PM 2/1/2006, you wrote:
<<
I agree with you in principal except I like to use VIEWS instead of
temporary tables. I am sure that there may be instances where you could
only do something with a temporary table but do't discount the use of
VIEWS since you can have VIEWS of VIEWS.
If you need a table you could always PROJECT it from the view.
In the years that I have been a member of this list it has been my
impression that VIEWS are an underutilized feature of RBase.
>>
My original statement was a bit of an oversimplification.
My first approach is to use a permanent view in the database if
possible. If that fails, I'll try a temporary view, or series of
temporary views. If that doesn't give me the results I need, or has
performance problems, I'll go to a temporary table solution -- often
starting the calculations by projecting from one or more views to get the
initial data.
The biggest advantage that sending the data to a temporary table has is in
performance. Firstly, I get more control over performance by decomposing
the computation into a number of steps -- in effect, I can get some manual
control over optimization. Secondly, I can quickly restrict my dataset to
the records I need. Finally, you have to pay the view computation costs
every time you hit the view -- with a temporary table you only pay
once. So I'm able to let the user enter a complex selection, test it by
counting the records or browsing them, and then to select several
different dispositions for the data (a detail report, a summary report, a
set of PDF files and an Excel spreadsheet) without having to pay the
computation costs again.
The important issue I wanted to stress for Dan is getting the complex
calculations out of the report expressions and instead presenting the
report writer with a dataset that looks pretty much like what you want the
report to look like.
--
Larry
Dan Champion
www.championsolutions.net
616-299-7420
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