|
Subsets of Flat Files Each flat file serves as initial input for creating a group of related reports. Taken together, several files allow for different reporting views. Designing the flat files requires basic understanding of the reporting requirements of user departments. If needed, files may be grouped into departmental sets. Whenever required, subsets or aggregates of a file are imported into a GenRe system. This process automatically creates a GenRe set (consisting of a file and a corresponding online program). A GenRe file is also a flat file that holds a maximum of 20,000 records. This restriction is due to PC hardware constraints but it is not an issue for as long as the maximum number of report lines (say the permutation of number of product lines x number of sales branches x reporting date range) does not exceed 20,000. It can be argued that a report with more than 1,000 lines is not a business intelligence report but a transaction or masterfile listing. Currently, up to 2 million records may be processed from each flat file. This arbitrary restriction is easy to change. The corporate reporting version includes three modules: import, extract and aggregation that take care of moving data into GenRe system. One to five GenRe files may be used to create text or graphical reports that are exportable to Microsoft Excel. Point-and-click programming is carried out using online programs, the batch processing module and/or the report generator module. Any GenRe set may cloned, tweaked and transformed into new sets, to come up with many report variations.
|