Brio Intelligence handled our fairly dirty data without a problem, as did the products from Cognos and MicroStrategy. For example, our database contained several columns that required a simple Boolean value--an X designated a "yes" and an empty string meant "no." Some data, however, was entered as neither an X or empty, but contained other single character values, such as Y for yes. Using grouping functions provided by Brio, we grouped all the tuples (a collection of attributes) that represented a positive value (X's and Y's) into a single "virtual" column.
Normalized data (see "Data: Clean and Normal"), on the other hand, was a problem for both Brio and MicroStrategy. While both solutions eventually dealt with the problem, they entailed much more work than Cognos and Information Builders. Both Brio Intelligence and MicroStrategy required us to create separate "views" to deal with the normalized data. For each duplicate column that used the same lookup table, the products had to create a separate report.
Brio Intelligence 6.6, from $55 for Quickview and $54,995 for full server. Brio Software, (800) 879-2746, (408) 496-7400. http://www.brio.com
Microstrategy 7i
MicroStrategy 7i provided the most extensive RBAC-based security model of the products we tested, but it took a long time to generate reports, unlike the rest of the products. ACLs can be created on a combination of object/report/function/user basis, providing for the most control over data and application access in our tests. We loved the ability to limit access to report functionality and objects (prebuilt queries that represent typical business objects, such as a customer or an order). Other vendors should provide such a high level of security.
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