Report generation facility, a high-level interface for coherent access to heterogeneous database systems

The Report Generation Facility is a high-level interface designed and implemented to support coherent access of data stored in a number of stand-alone, independent, database systems served by it. Specifically, the Report Generation Facility provides a menu which allows a user to request one or more standard reports provided by the individual database systems and the Report Generation Facility, or to formulate a query in an English-like query language without having to specify where the requested data reside or how to retrieve them. The Report Generation Facility translates the user's request or query into subtransactions to the individual database systems and submits the substransactions in order to retrieve and format the data requested by the user. Thus, the Report Generation Facility provides a standard way to produce reports based on data stored in the database systems with minimal user effort and expertise. This paper describes its capabilities and architecture.