Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Produce Analytic Reports Using Oracle Apex vs. Excel Spreadsheet

For those who know how to write SQL scripts, Oracle Apex is a great tool to present the analytic result online. There is no need to learn another web authoring language. Almost everything is done using SQL, reports, charts, Checkboxes, radioes, select lists. Once I spent a few days and built an internal employee fraud monitoring tool for a bank.

I have found that building report online using Apex is far more efficient than using Excel spreadsheet.

  • Creating Spreadsheet involves manual editing which is error prone. With Apex, reports or charts are simply SQL queries.
  • It is harder to distribute spreadsheet files. Typically, they are distributed through emails as attachments. To keep them up to date is a problem. Any changes in the report will require the spreadsheet files to be resent and it may cause a lot of confusions for the receiver.With Apex, all we need is a URL link to the report.
  • Most importantly, reports in the form of spreadsheet have to be "fixed" which means we have to create them in advance and they become unchanged once created. With Oracle apex, reports are generated on-the-fly based on the users' inputs. In database terms, reports are simply SQL queries that are executed in real time. Thus, the number of reports that can be produced by a Apex page is huge(for example, our reports are based on the users' selection of date ranges, States,product types, etc.). It is hard to produce and navigate a spreadsheet file that has more than, say 100, tabs.

The following screenshot is from one of the reports that I built using Oracle Apex.

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