04 December 2007

A Whack at My Ego

The Chic Geek's latest post threw me for a loop. She posted about built in views in GP that would allow straightforward queries like:

Select * from employees.

No, it couldn't be. But sure enough, there's a bunch of views in GP 10 with friendly names like ItemQuantities. These views are NOT present in my GP 9 installation but are present in Chic Geek's v9 install. My GP 9 installation has been through numerous upgrades and I can't be sure that whatever would install those views was installed. My GP 10 is a vanilla install of everything on CD1.

The Chic Geek speculates that these may be Smart Tag related and I doubt we installed the Smart Tag parts with our original 7.0 install. Which means we wouldn't have upgraded them through 7.5, 8 and 9. Certainly the views are not Smartlist related or they would be in my v9 install as well.

This is a good thing for basic reporting. Certainly views aren't as fast as Stored Procs but they will make report building easier for lots of users. Also, a view should be faster than doing a bunch of joins from within Crystal or SSRS, both in terms of building and running the report. Perhaps now we will finally be able to tell people how to easily find data for reporting. Wouldn't that be cool!