Business analysts and managers are familiar with pivot tables through their experience with Microsoft Excel. Pivot tables allow them to extract, summarize and drill-down into data to make more productive use of the enterprise’s databases.

Coincident with COMMON, <a href="http://www.mrc-productivity.com/">michaels, ross & cole, ltd. (mrc)</a> announced a pivot table reporting class for its m-Power development tool suite. Using this new reporting class, m-Power users can quickly create Web-based pivot tables.

m-Power users access pivot tables in any Web browser. The browser-based pivot table function displays buttons for each available data field. Users can then drag-and-drop those buttons to create the row and column dimensions for the pivot table.

m-Power builds pivot tables by accessing data directly from a database. mrc’s history is on the IBM i platform, but m-Power, including its new pivot table reporting class, can create applications that run on any platform that supports Java. It is able to access data stored in most major databases, including DB2/400, Oracle, MySQL and MSSQL. <b>-- Joel Klebanoff</b>