And even
when the data is in an accessible format, you may need to process it heavily to achieve a
useful result. For example, you might need to find the average sales of a certain region,
rather than just a list of individual sales.
Of course, once you??™ve analyzed the data and extracted some useful information,
you??™ll need to present it intelligently; raw numbers are rarely useful outside academia.
Today??™s business world requires powerful, attractively designed reporting, with features
like charts, graphs, and images.
Essentially, this book will cover these three points: importing foreign data into a
database, analyzing that data to get a useful result, and then formatting that data in a way
that can be easily examined. To begin, you??™ll need a database in which to store your data
and a library to access it. This chapter introduces two useful open source databases and
Active Record, a powerful database access library.
Choosing a Database
A wide variety of connection adapters are available for various databases, including
Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
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