What are the Difference Between master file approach and SQL Pass through?

how do we know which approach to select?

Which is the most preferred approach and why?

Thanks,
Yash

This message has been edited. Last edited by: <Kathryn Henning>,

This is probably more of a personal preference type of thing and where your experience lies.

We use more SQL pass because we are more comfortable writing queries that can perform well against our db's.

I think it is also the complexity of your data and how you want to join tables together to get the results you want.

Our main goal is to try and reduce the db calls and reduce the amount of data being sent back to the WF server. Let the DB do it's job and WF do it's job.

That's my two cents. The product is flexible to what you want.

Wow, you're missing a big thing.
We only use master files.

We have a separate departments:
Datawarehouse team takes care of the ETL and master files.

MIS consults with the business and develops reports.

MIS doesn't ( need to ) know about SQL, ugly technical names, etc.

But even more important. If anything changes in the technical architecture, we only have to update the masterfiles and not -all- reports.

( and the fields have better names )

For files with multiple joins and large volumes of data we simply create a sql procedure and have it refresh on our server daily/weekly. We then make a master file out of the table. It feels like cheating but many times we run into JOIN issues and sluggish behavior trying to use master files. Whether it is WebFocus or our operating environment. I can not say.