Report Generation

A very common data processing operation is report generation. This is when the data in a file (or files) is processed by a program to generate a report of some kind. The report might be a summary of the financial state of a corporation, or a series of bills for its customers, or a series of checks to be mailed to its employees.

Large corporations have very large databases kept on many high capacity disks and processed by programs running on large computers called mainframes.