EASYQ

Unibased wrote an application query tool a few years back to supplement standard reports and R3 (Unibased's product data and your report generator tools). Along the way, we added a few improvements and incorporated them into modules such as WorkQ Management. WOW! It has become very popular, and even though it doesn’t have the bells and whistles of a commercial report generator, it is being used as such. Why not, it’s “free.”

However, it is really not free (licensure) because, if not monitored, high end-user query reporting can bring your system to its knees. End users can quickly create unrestricted queries, which will unnecessarily plow through your entire database, as often as they wish. While you may not necessarily want your end users to think like programmers, you do want them to have easy access; therefore, I.T. should monitor usage. When 50 or more EasyQ reports are being used over and over, it’s a regular production report, and you may be in trouble. Recommendation: be ready to convert to R3 or have Unibased create a standard report. Also don’t forget to consider Microsoft’s Excel. Meanwhile, Unibased is exploring the tightening of query restrictions and methodology to minimize disk IOs.