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Yes, it can. You need to have the ODBC interfaces, but if you do then WebFOCUS™ can use ODBC. Before, setting this up. First, establish your ODBC connection and then note the name and login information. Then when your are loading the EDA server portion of WebFOCUS, chose ODBC as one of the options. It will then walk you through the set up.
No, WebFOCUS™ is extremely flexible in this regard. If you wish, you can have everything on one machine. This is the simplest way to do it. But you may run into resource constraints. WebFOCUS™, the database and the Web Server will all be competing for resources on that one machine. You could put the database and the EDA Server on one machine and the Web Server and CGI/ISAPI on another. Or you could put the EDA Server on machine B, the Web Server and CGI/ISAPI on machine B, and the database on machine C. IBI doesn't recommend
No, the developers workbench is not necessary. For those of us who can write FOCUS™ code, the developers work bench may actually take more time. There are a couple of ways to approach this problem. First, write the focexecs using FOCUS 6™, mainframe FOCUS or notepad. Then have the administrator import them and publish them using the Developers Workbench. You can ignore the whole thing, if you chose (and I generally do). The only key is to make sure that you store it in a directory that the EDA server will search for execution. Do this just edit the EDA PATH statement. You should keep the HTML pages and the Focexecs in the same directory and remember that anything sent back by the CGI must have a fully qualified name.
No, that's one of the things that makes this tools so powerful - it's so
portable. WebFOCUS™ (as is FOCUS™ in general) is both data independent
and platform independent. If you keep the table name and column
names the same, then your WebFOCUS™ code won't know the difference.
Also, if you are using Copy Manager™ to load extract and load your data, it
will rebuild the load routines in Oracle for you. This is a major
savings as well. In development you can also save some money. Your
developers could be running against SQL Server databases on NT, which is cheaper
than Oracle licenses. Then you could do final testing on UNIX against the
Oracle tables.
If somebody has VSAM tables with lots of FOCUS™ reports, they can put them on the Web and at a later time port the data to a relational DBMS.
If you use a simple database reporting tool like Microsoft's Access® you can set up parameters in selection criteria, like input the year. So the query will extract using a where clause that has the year you entered. WebFOCUS™ is far more powerful than that. You set up parameters that are used in selection criteria values like the MS Access example, but you can have parameters for what fields you extract, what fields are used for selection, what tables are queried, what code is executed. The list goes on and on. It's very, very powerful.
In fact the Gartner Group estimates that 60% of an average Enterprise's reporting requirements are best meet by parametized reports.
Yes, it's all going to be on UNIX or NT in a relational database. Well we would all like to say that is how things are or are going to be. Unfortunately as the Y2K issue shows, organizations still run on legacy systems. There's very little economic justification for changing them unless the business can get a financial reward from doing it. Ask any CIO who has gone to management for money for a new Order Ship Bill System (OSB) when the one they had was working fine. That's about a five minute conversation and the CIO leaves empty handed.
So that data is going to be there for a long time. You may be able to stage all of the data for analysis and reporting. But it's cheaper and faster to stage the most critical data and then allow drill through to the details when needed. If you can't read legacy data, then you have to stage all the data. Which is more expensive and time consuming.
How can Reporting Bursting Save Money?
With automatic report bursting, you can run a report once and have each recipient get only the part of the report that is relevant to them. For example you could run a report of sales by sales region and salesman. The regional manager gets the summary and each salesman's report. The salesman gets only their report. You read the data only once. That cuts down on processing. The distribution is electronic which cuts down on paper, handling and delivery costs.
What type of resource do I need for WebFOCUS®?
The resources needed for WebFOCUS are minimal. The installation needs much less than 100 megs of disk space, but reserving that much space would be a good idea. The base memory requirements are .5 megabytes plus 2.5 megabytes for every user on the system. A more conservative approach would be to size the machine either as a web server, a database server, or a combination. Determine the processor, disk, and memory needed to perform those functions under Windows NT®. That should make sure that you wouldn't have any problem with WebFOCUS®. Remember Memory RULES! Adding more memory is never a bad idea and is fairly inexpensive. A couple of hundred dollars more can give big performance boosts.
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