RavenDB’s Dynamic Reporting
One of the nice things about having more realistic demo data set is that we can now actually show demos on that data. I didn’t realize how much of an issue that was until we actually improved things.
Let us see how we are going to demo RavenDB’s dynamic reporting feature.
We start by creating the following index. It is a pretty simple one, with the one thing to notice is that we are explicitly setting the Sort mode for Total to be Double.
Now that we have done that, we are going to go to Query > Reporting:
And then I can start issue reporting queries:
This is the equivalent of doing:
select EmployeeID, sum(tot.Total) Total from Orders o join ( select sum((Quantity * UnitPrice) * (1- Discount)) Total, OrderId from [Order Details] group by OrderID ) tot on o.OrderID = tot.OrderID where o.CustomerID = @CustomerId group by EmployeeID
The nice thing about this, and what makes this feature different from standard map/reduce, is that you can filter the input data into the aggregation.
In code, this would look something like this:
session.Query<Order>("Orders/Total")
.Where(x=>x.Company = companyId)
.AggregateBy(x=>x.Employee)
.SumOn(x=>x.Total)
.ToList();
Pretty nice, even if I say so myself.
Comments
Who said NoSQL is inappropriate for reporting scenarios?
From the blogs and articles I've read this is what was holding me back from using RavenDB. It's great to be able to provide reporting options in the management studio.. but is there any know reporting products that work with RavenDB?
Stephen, RavenDB is still not primarily meant for reporting. We support replication to RDMBS, which would be your reporting db.
This looks pretty interesting as we evaluated RavenDB for reporting purposes several months back. If you say it's not meant (primarily) for reporting then what is the use-case for this feature? Is it well suited for an OLAP environment or not very well optimized for it?
Stephen - I'm fairly sure it will work with most reporting solutions, at least those that give you full control of the datasource. I plan to test this pretty hard with Stimulsoft Reports (www.stimulsoft.com) in the future. I bet it would work with ActiveReports and others as well.
Nathan, It is for reporting, but reporting is still not a primary feature. This is to give you some reporting capabilities, and it is pretty optimized right now. But note that most reporting solutions would want to control the data source themselves. Any reporting tool that give allow you to provide it with the data source should work.
Matt, I would love to have a post about this when you are done.
Comment preview