Excellant Data Transformation Toolkit
Better Decisions, Better Insight
Today’s economy demands a better understanding of current and potential impacts to their organization. To do that, users need data from their Oracle databases that can be used to gain better insight, to support better decisions. However, it takes more than just access to databases; users need to be able to analyze and work with data to extract the requisite value.
Extracting, modeling and analyzing data is expensive and time consuming. The IT team is continuously inundated with requests for more reports, more analysis, more views of the data captured by the transactional systems – and the requests and the requirements keep changing. The business user is well-versed in productivity tools like Microsoft Office Excel to explore and analyze data to discover the answers to what-if scenarios. The path to better decisions can be created by the hands of the user as long as they can get accurate data from their legacy databases.
Excellant
Excellant is toolkit for PL/SQL programmers that provides for the transformation of a result set into a formatted spreadsheet for the business users without the cost and time of creating custom reports. There are a number of key objectives for Excellant:
- Visibility – Current information can be quickly extracted from Oracle databases and into Microsoft Office desktop applications
- Analysis – Allows the business user to manipulate and analyze data to better understand the changing dynamics of the business and marketplace.
- Increased Flexibility – Information requirements change rapidly to try to address new strategies and the user can directly modify the spreadsheet to reflect most of those requirements, limiting scope and need for changes requests to IT.
How It Works
Streamlined and Secure- Excellant was written as a stored procedure that is made available in the Oracle database data dictionary. It takes only minutes to install and of course, does not require an application server. Excellant supports both Oracle 8i and 10g.
Easy to Use - Excellant is designed to behave like an extension of PL/SQL, making it easy for the PL/SQL programmer to learn how to transform the results of a query into an Excel spreadsheet. The query results are mapped to columns in the spreadsheet and additional parameters control the style, formatting, charting and formulaic calculations.
Industry Standards - Excellant transforms the result set to Office Open XML (OOXML), which is an Ecma standard developed and supported by Microsoft. Starting with Microsoft Office 2007, the Open Office XML file formats (ECMA-376) have become the default file format of Microsoft Office. Excellant output can be used by Microsoft Office Excel 2003 or 2007 clients.
Low Cost - Excellant has a remarkably small footprint in the IT landscape as a stored procedure. In addition, PL/SQL programmers will find Excellant extraordinarily easy-to-use in creating formatted spreadsheets for the business user.
Excellant Example - This is an example of how easy it to to export data from Oracle to Excel, multiple sheets can be exported with formulas that work in Excel. (Example)
Get Output Like This!
