Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Report: Other Aspects
Report Performance
Report performance is a key factor in the impressions that users form
about an application. Most users do understand the complexity vector —
that there are certain types of reports that need to scan and analyze more
and will take longer. They are also aware that reports that need to process
a lot of data will take longer. It is therefore good to, at the outset, classify
reports into
reports. When the reports are
released, the expectations of performance can be adjusted easily and
tuning efforts devoted appropriately.
Performance can be an issue when using OTS reports where, many a
time, the queries are generated by the system and cannot be hand-tuned.
As discussed in Chapter 9 on OTS products, one is buying someone else's
design and they may not be doing something the way one would have
done it. Do not promise performance with third-party reports without
benchmarking them for one's environment.
simple
,
medium
, and
complex
Security of Reports
Reports are produced, distributed, and stored. They have to be designed
and kept appropriately.
One is for reasons of economy. The other is for
reasons of security. An old report can still convey a lot of valuable
information because many things do not change frequently. For example,
an employee report from four months ago will get one the names of most
of the current employees.
Most businesses do not have formal filing and distribution tracking
mechanisms as in the intelligence or military organizations. It can safely
be assumed, therefore, that one does not know where the data now lies
and who has access to it.
Sometimes reports have strict security filters. An employee can see or
not see certain fields or data. They may or may not access certain reports.
These kinds of restrictions require one to build and install special gate-
keeper layers. Do not assume that database-level controls are adequate
to manage such security.
Summary
Reports are critical outputs from any application. Applications, however,
continue to give more importance to processing and storing data than to
the delivery of reports. Good report design is difficult. It requires one to
