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From: jas@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Jim Shankland)
Newsgroups: comp.databases,comp.lang.misc,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: need help choosing between INGRESS and PROGRESS
Keywords: INGRESS, PROGRESS
Message-ID: <29145@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 11 May 89 19:18:52 GMT
References: <985@resource.UUCP> <309@viusys.UUCP> <24295@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
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Reply-To: jas@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Jim Shankland)
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In article <24295@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield) writes:
>I haven't used PROGRESS, but I can confirm the weakness
>of Ingres' report writer.
>
>First of all, it is limited to a single retrieve, so if
>you need to report information from more than one table
>(as you do in any well-designed relational database), you
>have to first do a retrieve outside the report into a table
>just for the report. (Example: You have names in one
>table, addresses in a second, and phone numbers in a third.
>You have to combine these into a single table prior to
>running a report on that table.)

Last time I used the RTI INGRES report writer (a while ago!), the
"single retrieve" certainly didn't have to be a single-table query!
Nor was there any restriction on the use of views in the retrieve
query.  I agree that if what you say were true, it would be a very
serious limitation.  Perhaps this is an RTI (commercial) INGRES
vs. University INGRES confusion? (I assumed the original poster
was comparing two commercial DBMS.)

>Third, you can count or compute other aggregations, but you can
>only count everything inside a report. You can't count on a where
>condition. (Example: I wanted to report all employees of a
>company in our database and count the number of those who
>were alumni of this institution. I couldn't do it in the
>report. I had to do it in quel.)

Such aggregations probably *should* be done in the query language;
that's what it's there for.  Seems wrong to me to duplicate that
functionality in the report writer.  Of course, then the report writer
needs to support reports containing the results of multiple queries.

Jim Shankland
jas@ernie.berkeley.edu

"Blame it on the lies that killed us, blame it on the truth that ran us down"