Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

The business costs of database reporting tools can quickly become prohibitive for smaller businesses, especially if they must deal with multiple databases. Both having a specialized reporting tool for each one and buying one of the commercial one-size-fits-all solutions are expensive. If you are in this fix, perhaps you should look at DataVision, the free (as in beer) Open Source data reporting tool originally developed by Jim Menard.

Datavision is similar in many ways to Crystal Reports and uses a similar drag-and-drop graphical user interface (GUI). To quote from the site, “Reports can be designed using a drag-and-drop GUI. They may be run, viewed, and printed from the application or exported as HTML, XML, PDF, Excel, LaTeX2e, DocBook, or tab- or comma-delimited text files. The output files produced by LaTeX2e and DocBook can in turn be used to produce PDF, text, HTML, PostScript, and more.”

That makes for a very versatile product. Better yet, the tool is written in Java and will run almost anywhere. Datavision will work with any database for which a JDBC driver is available, which is most databases, including but not limited to Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Informix, hsqldb, Microsoft Access, and Progress .