|
||||
 |
 |
|
||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
|||
|
HOLD Everything!
FOCUS has always supported HOLD files for extracting data to serve either as input for other reports, as selection criteria, or as input for other applications (including the static Web pages of today). Over time, in response to rapid IT industry growth and a steady increase in potential target destinations, both our customers' formatting needs and their FOCUS HOLD options have grown dramatically.
When FOCUS debuted, of course, there were no personal computers, relational databases, or spreadsheet products as we know them today. There were just mainframe computers and several generations of users with rather limited access to corporate data and fairly basic extraction needs: most wishing to just reprocess subsets of their data, which might include temporary fields added in DEFINE or COMPUTE statements. Our original default BINARY format produced sequential, single-segment HOLD files with the data in the predefined formats and accompanying HOLD Master Files and met users' needs quite well. Since Binary extract fields are full-word aligned, however, an alternate INTERNAL format was later added for use in working with 3GL programs where padding of integer and packed-data fields is undesirable.
Acceptance of personal computers for business computing brought demands from corporate DP analysts wishing to download data to crunch with Lotus, Excel, and other PC applications. This prompted development of our comma-delimited formats (COMMA, COM, and COMT) and set the stage for later custom formats for third-party products, as the comma-delimited spreadsheet formats were soon augmented or superseded by DIF, LOTUS, SYLK, EXCEL, EXL97, and EXL2K. The DIF, LOTUS, and SYLK formats produce character files easily incorporated into Microsoft's Multiplan and Lotus spreadsheet products, while EXCEL formats capture report output as EXCEL spreadsheets and EXL2K adds the ability to pass along ACROSS column titles as well as formulas and pivot tables with the spreadsheets.
The greatest proliferation of custom HOLD format requests accompanied the database boom of the 1980s, as FOCUS users asked for help producing extracts for popular third-party RDBMS engines. The supported formats include: DB2 and SQL (IBM's DB2 for VM), SQLORA (Oracle), INGRES (Ingres), SQLSYB (Sybase), SQLMSS and SQLODBC (Microsoft), SQLINF (Informix), and REDBRICK (Redbrick). In each case, their use required the presence of an appropriate adapter, plus the authority to create tables.
FOCUS styling advances, and in particular the addition of FOCUS StyleSheets, facilitated sophisticated layouts suitable for high-level presentations and annual reports. To maximize the impact of these elaborate layouts, customers sought PostScript (PS) and portable document format (PDF) formats to support parallel publication on multiple media and platforms.
Finally, global Internet adoption necessitated addition of HTML and HTMLTABLE formats to enable FOCUS users to fully exploit Internet and Web services. Today these formats, which capture report output as either complete HTML documents or as standalone HTML tables, enable near instantaneous distribution of your FOCUS output to audiences worldwide…and beyond.
While not an all inclusive summary by any means, I hope you get an idea of the scope of the opportunities you have at hand for creating extracts for a wide variety of uses. For details, see the a comprehensive list of FOCUS HOLD options and accompanying documentation links on our Web site here.
|
