July 24, 2008 02:58pm pdt

1. RedKelvin 2,000
1. vadimrapp1 2,000
1. tcarternyc 2,000
1. James0... 2,000
1. dportas 2,000
1. alain34 2,000
1. momi_sa... 2,000
8. angelIII 1,600
9. frankytee 1,500
9. weellio 1,500
9. CSLARSEN 1,500
9. amitkh2006 1,500
13. ee_rlee 1,400
14. ozo 1,200
15. blu 800

1. nedfine 4,125
2. ozo 2,200
3. RedKelvin 2,000
3. James0... 2,000
3. vadimrapp1 2,000
3. alain34 2,000
3. momi_sa... 2,000
3. dportas 2,000
3. tcarternyc 2,000
10. angelIII 1,900
11. Raynard7 1,600
12. weellio 1,500
12. gauthampj 1,500
12. MerijnB 1,500
12. frankytee 1,500
12. CSLARSEN 1,500
12. amitkh2006 1,500

03.12.2008 at 03:03PM PDT, ID: 23236908

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6.2

Seeking good data viewing/mining utilities: graphs, prepared queries, one-off queries

Zones: Data Mining, Miscellaneous Software, Databases Miscellaneous

Tags: Business Objects, Crystal Reports, SPSS, like utilities, SQL, perl, php, postgres, mysql, Firefox, Seamonkey, data and data mining utilities

I'm seeking advice on tools, for visualizing business data, for data-hungry managers and directors. Multiple responses are great, I'll split the points among all who have good input.

We geocode our customer addresses.
The bulk of our data is in postgres, some is in mysql and filemaker.
We have set up various "views", which people access via ODBC.
We build some spreadsheets automatically using the perl module SpreadSheet::ExcelWriter.
We publish a few graphs using the gnuplot unix utility.
We export some data to a GIS system and/or Google Earth (as some data is spatial).

But people want more and more data... and lots of breakouts down to very small detail. If we can hand them a tool, we don't have to build each particular subreport.

The ODBC views are reasonably functional... but pretty hidden, and the interface for getting things in and out of Excel is really bad. Supplying parameters to the views is even harder.

The managers are reasonably able to use computer tools, but not gear heads. By and large they are not good at statistics, and are prone to following trends too closely, and making bad inferences about the validity of data.

We process about 400 transactions a day, and have about 16000 customer records. This is not a tremendously large system. Our backend systems are Unix, our front ends are mostly Mac OS X. Our budget is thousands of dollars, not tens of thousands, not millions.

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Question Stats

Zone: Database

Question Asked By: brycen

Solution Provided By: nmcdermaid

Participating Experts: 5

Solution Grade: A

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