The multinational companies Ambev and Danone have charged a consulting company called Equipos Retail with the design of a poll for obtaining information about water and beer sales throughout Uruguay. During 2002, more than 20 thousand stores throughout the country participated in this work.
Once the information was compiled, Equipos turned to STA -GeneXus software house- in order to receive a flexible option for final users to work with the data. The objective was using a tool that would enable final users to query a database in a friendly and flexible way, with a commonly used interface.
"The information obtained from the national store poll was first processed in our system, because this way we could control it. However, we needed flexibility, and especially, a way to provide our clients with the independence for them to use it and exploit it", explained Ernesto Wainer, a sociologist at Equipos Retail, who is in charge of the coordination and the implementation of the poll.
STA guided Equipos Retail through the process of choosing a tool that would allow them to exploit the information obtained from the poll, and they decided to use GXQuery. "We proposed the creation of a data model in GeneXus so that it could be analyzed from GXQuery. Once we had the model created, the dynamic and flexible exploitation of queries became something simple to do," said José Luis Chalar, STA Director.
GXQuery is the ARTech tool that enables final users to query a database without the need to previously build a Data Warehouse or perform any additional development.
"The size of the database is not a problem because GXQuery uses sentences that seek to optimize access. Thanks to this, response times have always been good in spite of the considerable volume of entries (millions of entries)," added Chalar.
"The use of GXQuery simplified data handling and control, by offering the client a portable solution that was easy to operate," said Wainer.