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.