Exposing large webservice datasets for consumption by Access or Excel

Question

I have a large dataset, say 1,000,000,000 rows, that lives on a server. I need a user to be able to consume (i.e. "run queries upon") that data seamlessly, over the web, from within Access and/or Excel. Additionally, I need to filter the data on the server-side according to the user connected to it.

My current approach is to create a webservice that looks like an ODBC data source and connect to it from Excel.

Questions:

1. Is this the best way?
2. If so, what's the best way to create a custom ODBC data source?

Answer 1

1. I really thing that it is not the best way. I don't know your scenario, but I really would prefer another approach.

2. There is a discussion about that: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/335008/creating-a-custom-odbc-driver One of the suggestions was using BI approach.