FOSS Reporting tools (was Oracle 10g Express - any danger for Postgres?)

On Wednesday 2005-11-02 13:11, Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 02, 2005 at 01:25:31PM -0600, James Thompson wrote:
> > > Yes, sqlplus looks especially bad once you're used to banging around
> > > in psql. Although, I recently discovered rlwrap (a generic readline
> > > wrapper) which makes sqlplus almost tolerable. It's the best thing to
> > > happen to sqlplus since... well, since "quit" I suppose.
> >
> > I just wish pgsql had something similar to sqlplus's built in formatting
> > tools for output. Being able to set titles, row lengths, and breaks made
> > sqlplus a very nice reporting tool. A rather large majority of "reports"
> > at my old job consisted of sqlplus commands to set the format output, and
> > a sql statement redirected to our line printer.
> >
> > I haven't used Oracle since the mid 90s so I don't have a working example
> > but a description of some of the commands can be found here
> >
> > http://www.siue.edu/~dbock/cmis564/otext3.htm
>
> Given the choice, I'd *MUCH* rather have a good, easy-to-use CLI than a
> reporting tool. I'm not a GUI person, so I always hate working with
> Oracle and MSSQL in that regard. Of course db2's CLI is just horrid, but
> luckily it's easy to just substitute your shell for it's editing
> features, ie:
>
> db2 'select * from table'
> db2 'update ...'
>
> Believe it or not it very quickly becomes second nature to wrap
> everything in db2 '', so it's not nearly as bad as you'd think.
>
> In any case, how much user demand is there for a reporting tool for
> PostgreSQL? Either a seperate tool or better functionality in psql. My
> guess is that this isn't something that interests most of the
> developers, so the only way it's going to happen is if a lot of users
> speak up and ask for it. Of course speaking up with patches is far
> better.

I never really used SQL*Plus as a command line tool. I tended to use it as a
weak SQL scripting language.

Granted report generators can't be part of core PostgreSQL, they are still a
critical part of any database workshop.

===========

A) Are there any FOSS SQL scripting tools that output data ready for reporting
(like SQR, but better)?

B) Are there any FOSS tools that will take data and build pretty output.

C) Are there any FOSS tools of type B that will take streaming input from some
tool of type A.

D) Are there any FOSS tools that combine both A and B into one low learning
curve package like Crystal Reports.