Reporting with DB2

Question

I started learning .net about 3 years ago. I have gone thru a boot camp during that time learning OO and various data access technologies such as NHibernate, Subsonic, LINQ TO SQL. didn't wanna try EF cause it hasn't reached version 3 :)

As far as reporting goes, I have heard that many ORM'S fall flat on their face when it comes to reporting. We have AS400 OR DB2 as our backend. I have heard that LLBLGEN does a good job on reporting for this product. But it is a commercial product and not FREE. Can someone point me to some good resources for Reporting from DB2? thanks for any links/blog articles

Answer 1

Reporting on DB2 will work the same as reporting on almost any other database - you can use ODBC, JDBC or native DB2 calls to the database. So, you don't need DB2 reporting references - any database reporting references should meet your needs.

The only thing special about DB2 might be a little of the syntax extensions, and how you scale up the back end through parallel database servers (like MapReduce, Teradata, etc). But neither should be of much concern - since it's extremely ansi compliant and the scalability should be largely invisible to the reporting developer.

And Crystal Reports, Brio, Cognos, Business Objects, Microstrategy, Actuate, JasperReports, Birt, etc should all work fine.

ORMs are typically terrible for reporting - since they're object rather than set oriented. You'll especially feel the pain with very large data volumes, complex reports or a large number of reports.

Answer 2

Please, don't overlook the most obvious answer: Query/400!

It is native iSeries software. You configure and runs the report on the iSeries but it works great. It is simple, straight forward and maybe a little bit limited but you get most of the works done.

Don't be scared of the green screen or the simple interface. It's really a powerfull tool that does handle the iSeries database very well.

Answer 3

Can someone point me to some good resources for Reporting from DB2?

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