In defense of Excel

Re:In defense of Excel by Pxtl on Friday September 20, 2013 @11:39AM (#6418391)

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.

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Re:In defense of Excel by dangoldin on Friday September 20, 2013 @11:51AM (#6418466)

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 The issue we ended up running into is that the schema ended up evolving quite a bit so the queries became outdated and gave incorrect results.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.

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Re:In defense of Excel by specialist on Friday September 20, 2013 @06:26PM (#6420910)

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?

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