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	AnalyseWorks - Philosophy GroupWorks has been developing database solutions for 8 years, and has found: Many operational systems are good at putting data in but poor at getting data out Specific reports are OK, but are relatively expensive to develop and need revision Getting at data not available in specific reports or screens, particularly summary data, is hard Business opportunities are missed because nobody is looking at the data in the right way What is the history of AnalyseWorks? GroupWorks wrote a more generalised function for analysing data for several clients This was gradually improved and modified over a period of several years For another client, a drill-down Executive Information System-type interface was developed For another, data was queried and subsets displayed on a data sheet AnalyseWorks is the amalgam of these three developments into one, with further development to improve functionality, reliability and to make it into a product. What is the focus of AnalyseWorks? GroupWorks clients for which the components were originally developed are all relatively small. Some have no IT staff at all, some have IT support for hardware, database operations and networks, a couple have some basic application development and maintenance capability; but none have large IT departments with teams of experts and impressive budgets AnalyseWorks is designed for installation in this type of environment, where there is a real need to get at operational data in a flexible way but there is neither the resource locally to do this, nor to purchase and install top-end systems and have experts to use it. What are some of the limitations of AnalyseWorks? AnalyseWorks is aimed at small and medium business; it is not optimised for analysing large databases (more than a gigabyte or two) because it does not include the complexity to interact efficiently with databases that manage this volume of data using true OLAP techniques. AnalyseWorks produces a reasonable selection of graph formats and there is reasonable control over report output, perfectly sufficient for internal use, but is generally not of a standard to be put directly into say a corporate brochure; this is because there are already good, but fairly complex, packages for presenting data and AnalyseWorks wants to remain a simple-to-use product. AnalyseWorks is currently implemented in Microsoft Access, this means that it is not appropriate for use over the web (none of GroupWorks clients currently need web-based access); however, GroupWorks is looking at how AnalyseWorks can be redeveloped for Web access. AnalyseWorks does not contain a non-programmatic way of specifying how data should be manipulated during the loading of data (if it cannot be done with an Access query), after some research it was concluded that in difficult cases programmatic code would always be required, so rather than developing yet another language to learn, the transformations are specified in Visual Basic for Applications or in database procedures; skills which are readily available. © Groupworks Limited, 2003. All rights reserved.	More about...  Features and benefits   Screen shots   Who can use it   Requirements   Setup   Philosophy   Technical terms   Pricing