Analytics Software

Hello Discoverer OTN Community,

I am one year into playing around with Discoverer and now I have a best practices question. I know, I am a little late on the question but I still have to ask it. I am working with a product that delivers a Discoverer EUL; this company is new to Discoverer also and hasn’t made some of the best decisions on creating its EUL. I don’t mind adding features to what is delivered with the product but I tend to stay away from modifying what is delivered unless its that bad; modifications seem harder to keep up than additions. The existing views in the database, correlating to folders in Discoverer, for a person’s address does not quite follow my companies business practice; IE if they have defined 4 address types if you are missing one address you are to default to the next type in a specific order. I have worked out a function that can determine what this address is but I could also create a view that holds the address of choice in it. Since the function cannot return a ROWTYPE in Discoverer, I have created other functions to handle each part of an address you may want in a report. Here is a small picture

Main Address Function: get_persons_address (returns a ROWTYPE from the address view and uses companies business logic to determine which type of address is being returned.)

Street Line 1 Function: calls main function and parses out street line 1 from the address.
Street Line 2 Function: calls main function and parses out street line 2 from the address.
Street Line 3 Function: calls main function and parses out street line 3 from the address.
Street Line 4 Function: calls main function and parses out street line 4 from the address.
City Function: calls main function and parses out City
State Function: calls main function and parses out State
Zip Function: calls main function and parses out Zip Code

Knowing that the report might return at most 3000 – 5000 records is it better to use a function call (in this case it would be a call to Street Line 1, City, State and Zip) or created a new view in the database for a new folder in Discoverer for the users to use?

Appreciate any input people can give.

TTFN
Fletch