Is there another tool out there for building oracle reports other then oracle reports builder? [closed]

This is an old thread but here my take on it. For experienced developers (I should point out that I am one), Oracle Reports is unbelievably productive tool. For new developers, it can be baffling and frustrating. I have been in the "market" for an Oracle Reports alternative for some time now and have yet to find a tool that can do what Oracle Reports can do for me. The tools I have looked at:

• Oracle BI Publisher: Officially, this is the successor to Oracle Reports. One day it will be as good as Oracle Reports...right now it primarily uses MS Word as the report designer. Its not fun to to wrestle with Word (nested) tables (which replaces frames). I would prefer Reports Frames any day.

• Pentaho: I looked at this with minor interest, it's commercial open source and I thought did a pretty good job. Not sure how it scales and like all open source projects, is at the mercy of an active community.

• MicroStrategy: This is again a very seasoned product. BI is their bread and butter and so I would expect that its pretty good. I had a vendor do a POC and they replicated one of my most complex "Form" type reports (a business document, bill-of-lading). The price however it at enterprise level (read: very pricy). Although for departmental deployments they have a 'free' version.

• Microsoft Reporting: This one has good promise but it is sold primarily with MS SQL Server and I being an Oracle-guy has felt internal resistance to this tool. One of these days I will overcome it when the Reports Builder has crashed one too many times.

There are scores of others like JasperReports, Actuate, Business Objects (Crystal), Information Builders etc.

Don't bother switching tools, you'll probably only be disappointed. I've used many reporting tools and all of them have significant issues. No matter which tool you use you'll probably end up fighting it and gradually move more and more of your logic into the database. The more SQL tricks you learn the less you'll have to rely on poorly designed reporting tools.

Microstrategy or Business Objects. You may develop a custom software as erbsock has told, like a lightweight BO, create views from the selected fields by users, name them as reports and schedule a job to send them as a CSV file or in a jsp file , whatever the view part is. Also in Oracle Reports Builder, if you are not mentioning the old 6i interfaced tool, try to build one big query and try to build the XML using the publisher. I am outdated about it , but remember something like that. I will ask about it to an expert friend of mine.

Best Regards,

Kayhan YÜKSEL