Pick is a great OLTP platform, but let’s face it, reporting is always a problem. PREMEUS was created to open new options to you, and perhaps to help keep your MV system and staff in place.
Have you ever thought what data consumers think about the ever-plain reports you produce with SORT? Think about that weird look you get when you tell people they can’t use common reporting tools with your system. What about that moment when you tell them “our system doesn’t use SQL, it uses a different query language”. At that point the question is whether they’ll need to rely on IT for every report, or whether they’ll have to learn a new query language. But the bottom line is that they’re still not going to get the results they see advertised with those common reporting tools – and that’s bad news for everyone.
Simply stated, PREMEUS moves data from MV to Relational, RDBMS, SQL environments so that those problems go away.
As a bonus, PREMEUS also retrieves data from external environments so that you can incorporate the data into your apps. With this your MV platform actually gains value, where your system sits at the hub of other data sources so that you can use BASIC on it, do the magic you normally do, and then kick the results back out for consumption. Already do that with CSV files? Sure, but your business partners need to convert their RDBMS data into CSV, and everyone has to be told that your system is different. The tone of the conversation changes (with your clients, your vendors, and your own management) when everyone speaks the same language.
Moving data to another environment for (reporting, ) is a mainstream concept. It’s the basis of ETL, the raison d’être for datamarts and data warehouses. your data off of the server to a OLAP platform is not just a good idea, it’s a recognized and even expected approach to data management.
There are many reasons for this which a Marketing person from a high-cost data warehouse provider will gladly share. In short, separating the reporting data from the transactional data isolates both sides from issues caused by the other. Heavy reporting shouldn’t burden data entry people – which as you well know, it can if you’re generating a huge report on a live system. And reporting can be affected when transactional data is being changed while the report is being generated. To avoid these problems we try to run reports during off-hours – or we generate work files in MV and report from those.
Honestly, you can do what PREMUS does yourself. But you haven’t for all of the reasons we know about time, skills, budget, and that feeling of “I shouldn’t have to do this myself”. One of the goals for PREMEUS is to be that cool software that you always wanted to write to satisfy those “why can’t I do ‘this’” questions over the years. Another goal is to help prevent sites from moving away from MV because you haven’t had the luxury of time to write something like this.
There are other products in the MV industry that are similar to PREMEUS. If you’re already using one of those products and your users are happy with what you provide as the IT manager/developer, then there’s no need to go much further with your inquiry into PREMEUS. But if you have not purchased one of those products, or you have but you don’t use it, or you’re just not entirely satisfied with what you have now, then let’s keep going.
Some of the other products combine data export with reporting. Some of them started as reporting engines for MV, but to address the issues above of reporting from the data source they then started to near-line data away into work files for their purposes. Some products near-line into MV files and others move it out to a small RDBMS instance. Then they report from that instance. Well, PREMEUS does that export part but it doesn’t take the next step for reporting. Why should it when there are a million products out there that already do reporting? If you’re going to transform your data anyway then there’s no need to use a proprietary reporting tool – once your data is outside of MV the entire world is open to you.
From your perspective it’s probably been a priority to find tools that report in a way that’s comfortable to you. But that also keeps the burden of reporting firmly in the hands of the IT department. A lot of companies don’t want that. Users want to do their own ad-hoc reporting rather than submitting a request to IT and then having to wait for development, QA, etc. A lot of IT managers don’t want to be bothered with new reports either – there are more important things to do, and not enough people to it all. So while other products make reporting from MV easy for MV people, your users aren’t MV people – the products are great for what they do but the way they do it can bind a company in a way that may not be desirable.
It’s all about convenience. The question is – whose convenience? Let’s be frank here. Keeping as much as possible in MV is “supposedly” good for job security. MV staff keep their jobs if there’s always more to do. That’s not a given. Many companies get tired of being dependent on their IT staff for things that they want to do themselves. The Pick system has been replaced in many companies to get away from people who wanted to make themselves indespensible. MV-based reporting tools are convenience offerings to help MV managers do what’s required without extending too far out into the mainstream. They charge a price for the convenience of the IT department. While that’s a noble goal and has kept many people happy over the years, again, that’s not always acceptable to senior management.
PREMEUS is another convenience product. It provides a bridge that allows you to move a bit more outside of the comfort zone while still haing full control of everything in the MV domain. Of course there is a cost for this convenience. But PREMEUS is priced affordably to keep it comfortable. The lower cost compared to other offerings is intended to relieve some of the pain which will be felt when dealing with mainstream reporting options. Rather than coupling exports with reporting, and charging a high price for the bundling, PREMEUS does not extend into the “pretty reporting” realm, but focuses on doing one thing well. From there it’s up to you and your users to decide what reporting tools to use, now and in the future. Since this is exactly how all non-MV shops work, this now brings your server, software, and department more in-line with “mainstream” environments. This reduces or eliminates the risk of MV being a high-profile target for replacement – and that is good for your job security.
And that is Why We’re Here. We hope we can partner with you to make PREMEUS a transparent but highly valued solution for keeping everyone in your company satisfied with their IT reporting.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.