A glorious reporting tool

Question

I'm in search of a glorious reporting tool. I'm aware that glorious is a subjective term but... here are my desires:

• Dead simple for business types
• Does not require me to speficy any SQL
• Can inspect the database's schema to interpret the users requests without programmer intervention
• Costs next to nothing
• Can save commonly crafted reports

This sounds an aweful lot like pivot tables, except those would be too complicated for this environment.

Does such a tool exist, or am I doomed to spend the rest of my corporate programming career writing one off reports?

Answer 1

A do-everything report wizard has been the dream of many a programming house.

Step 1 is realize its unnatainable. Step 2 is to find a happy medium between a perfect wizard and a coder writting custom reports all day.

Try creating a company specific wizard. I made one with some handy, "let the user do it" type filtering. I give the user a textbox for each field they want to filter, and let them add comma delimited filters, using % as the wildcard, - for ranges, and constructing the query from those. It also helps to dump results to excel, and let the marketing thugs play with it from there (they usually are pretty handy with excel).

Where it gets hairy is joins. Instead of trying to figure out which tables to join in a report, instead offer them 6-12 standard groupings, each pre-defined grouping should cover just about everything. I did this using a tab UI.

Answer 2

The scary thing about ad-hoc reporting is: you're certain to get an answer. Knowing that the answer is right is when you need us - the guys who understand the schema.

It's when you try to accomodate that by restricting the kinds or scope of reporting you can do to simple filters and such that they get less and less useful.