Introduction to ENFORM

1 Overview of ENFORM
058051 Tandem Computers Incorporated 1–1
Information about your business is critical to controlling the business. You need this
information to make timely and correct decisions, to satisfy customer or management
requests, and to plan for the future.
If your organization depends upon online transaction processing to run its business,
you typically store large amounts of complex information as data files in a database.
The data can change constantly and rapidly. And for the data to be useful, you must
be able to interrogate the database: to select and retrieve its information quickly,
accurately, and in a form that satisfies your needs (Figure 1-1).
Figure 1-1. Data Retrieval
ENFORM is a product provided by Tandem to help meet your need for retrieving
information from the online database. ENFORM enables all users (programmers and
non-programmers alike) of a Tandem system to query the database—to ask questions
about their business and to retrieve the answers (as reports) on their terminals or as
printed documents.
The following pages describe ENFORM and discuss its use in an online transaction
processing environment.