| Database opinion I work on a team within a large project where I am kind of the "go to IT guy" i.e I'm not in my company's IT department, but I used to work there before I joined this project team so I deal with all technical aspects of the team.
One of my duties is maintaining an Access database that the team uses to house their information. I have pretty constant requests from them for reports where I run a pre-built queries that I created, dump the results in Excel, and send them off. Every few months the source data for the database has to be refreshed and new reports have to be run.
My question is if there is anyway I can make these certain, common reports to be "self service" ? I can't change the fact that it is an Access database (corporate decision) and management doesn't want anyone else to have Access installed. I'd want to make these reports as friendly as easy as possible so the other members of the team wouldn't have to learn about table structures, etc.
Any ideas? Thanks.
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| You could move the data into a shared instance of SQL Server Express, have Access link to the tables (instead of housing them), and whip up a simple front end in Access that users pick the reports, enter parameters, and that's that. You can wrap it up as a run-only package for users (does require the Access runtime, which I think is free to distribute).
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| reply to beeman65
One of the first questions to ask is how the users would trigger a "self-service" report? Web based? Are there any parameters to be inputted? And how are designed your queries? Plain SQL? Report generator?
I understand that the management does not want any user to be capable of running queries on their own, so report generators on the user machines are out of the question.
Please elaborate a bit on the use case you're envisioning.
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| said by Black Box:One of the first questions to ask is how the users would trigger a "self-service" report? Web based? Are there any parameters to be inputted? And how are designed your queries? Plain SQL? Report generator?
I understand that the management does not want any user to be capable of running queries on their own, so report generators on the user machines are out of the question.
Please elaborate a bit on the use case you're envisioning.
I'd prefer as simple as possible, so probably web based. One common report would need one parameter inputted ('Return all data with the Role number XX') and the others would not need a parameter and just run a pre-built query. The queries are plain SQL.
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1 edit | If you're talking web-based execute/read-only, you can use the Access database and whip-up your interface using ASP.NET to display the query results using the stock databound controls. Alternatively, move it to SQL Server and connect to that if you aren't using Access built-in report generator.
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Houston, TX | reply to beeman65
I just finished writing an application kinda like what you are describing. I got tired of running reports for people so i made an internal site on PHP and JavaScript and now they can run their own reports and all i have to do is setup the query once.
I found it that it was easier to have the URL dictate the parameters to be used in a report. EX: »analytics.domain.com/+report+aaa···y+7-days
My code would take the "+report+aaa+radiology+7-days" and pass it to the controllers where it would get routed to the specificity method. The above would load the "report" module, execute the "aaa" report for the radiology department for the last 7 days. |
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