Adam Bromwich's objective in PeopleSoft HRMS Reporting is to synchronize the perspectives of technical people (PeopleSoft designers and administrators) and functional people (managers who use PeopleSoft). If technicians know what managers need and managers know what technicians can do, more productive enterprises will result. Bromwich succeeds admirably, explaining the human resources, payroll, and benefits aspects of the PeopleSoft HRMS database. Taking a table-by-table approach to the information PeopleSoft stores, the book explains each field in many of the most useful tables and details unusual formatting where it's an issue. He also explains how various pieces of data relate to one another and how best to access them. In one sense, this is a guided tour of a great big relational database.

What's neat about Bromwich's style is his frequent inclusion of workaday tricks and shortcuts for getting things done quickly and easily. These aren't the contrived "hints and tips" that characterize so many software books. Rather, they're practical procedures that the author has learned on the job as a consultant. He's also quick to clarify confusing aspects of PeopleSoft's interface, explaining, for example, that a pay run ID is not the same as a user run ID or a run control ID. He's also careful to explain how PeopleSoft has changed through its revisions, documenting how what used to be a straightforward record of U.S. Social Security numbers is now a more complex facility for handling many countries' citizen-identification systems. --David Wall

Topics covered: The structure and contents of three major PeopleSoft databases: human resources, payroll, and benefits. Detailed attention goes to dates, control tables, personal information tables, department trees, payroll runs, tax issues, and query design with the SQR language.