Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangoldin | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea. It's such a difficult usability problem that it's tough to solve it for everyone. I had a job where I was responsible for getting business folk the data they needed and kept on trying to come up with a way for them to extract data from the database without having them to write queries. I got this nugget from the CTO: "To get the expressiveness of SQL you will be writing SQL"

Just need to figure out where the tradeoffs are and I think Excel made a pretty good one. I think Excel shouldn't be used for recurring jobs but for the one off it can't be beat.

View on HN

Heh, at one smaller group I worked we ended up just creating some query-only SQL accounts for some select technically-inclined business folks and installing Toad on their machines, and let them hit the production database. It worked shockingly well, in spite of the 9000 reasons that this is a terrible idea. For more complicated stuff, we often could handle their service requests just by emailing out a query that they'd just save to the desktop.

It was obviously a really crude approach, but it worked... i've worked at a lot of places with more mature and sophisticated approaches to ad-hoc reporting requests but they were all way more of a headache in terms of IT workload.

Of course, it didn't hurt that one of the VPs quickly became a SQL select-statement guru within the exec team.

We had that going for a while too and it worked well. Someone with a SQL knowledge would write the query and then hand it off to the people with the read only SQL accounts. The issue we ended up running into is that the schema ended up evolving quite a bit so the queries became outdated and gave incorrect results. Then we had to have a process to centralize the queries and turn them into maintained views that could then be used as a the bases for the queries.

Why aren't SQL/ODBC/JDBC APIs exposed as-is?

What does fronting a database with a web service buy you? Rate throttling? Load balancing? Metering?

Why isn't there a JBDC proxy server thingie that does those things for straight JDBC?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com