Building and performance tuning a distributed reporting application for an OODBMS

INTRO --------Distributed Reporting (DR) is an Object Oriented application developed by Texas Instruments Semiconductor division. It is written primarily in Smalltalk with some related external processes written in C++. It is a reporting tool for data stored in an object database. TI semiconductor manufacturing is currently supported by a mainframe application. DR was developed to address the need for a more robust, flexible, and less costly reporting tool than was currently available on the mainframe. It was designed to allow end users to select the data they want to report on and layout that information as desired via GUI interfaces. The requirements included that it must have equal or better responsiveness than the mainframe application, not be restricted to SC manufacturing data but be able to report on any data stored in the OODB, and be easily integrated into other applications.