System for database reports generating

Flexible report generation is a typical problem for database applications in business, management and administration. The subject of the paper is the new system developed at Tomsk State University and Sibgeoinformatics Ltd. The system is targeted to small enterprises and offices. It can produce sophisticated ready-to-use reports, which could be created and modified easily without the necessity for the user to make routine work and learn much about SQL queries. As a result, the development of a report is focused on describing tables with columns/rows and sub-columns/sub-rows, rules of data selection and summarising for the report, particularly, table or column/row, and formatting the report in the destination document. The distinctive features of the system are: an XML-based report definition language; report interpreter, independent of data source and destination; adjustable data interface tested with popular data sources (MS Excel, Oracle, MS Access) and report destinations (MS Excel, MS Word); WYSIWYG report description editor (under construction); ability to describe multi-dimensional tables in the report; ability to create tables with nested columns and rows; a wide set of traditional data selectors, statistics, functions, and expressions; usual set of sorting and formatting features; performing optimisation of SQL code by minimisation of selection conditions and splitting or joining SQL queries