Happy Holidays!
As we head into the holidays – we just wanted to say thanks for a great year – from the Virtual Conferences to programs, content and community, we sincerely have enjoyed working with you this year. A lot of people don’t realize the SSWUG, the vConferences and other things we’re doing are not just a couple of people – we have more than 15 full-time people working to bring you great content, great tools, video, articles and all of the other goodies on the site. From all of us, to all of you – we hope you have a fantastic holiday season!
ROI of Creating Meaningful Views for Users?
Is there a point where giving users views and other pre-built access methods makes sense (or doesn’t make sense)? I ask because of a note I received about the whole Office and SQL Server thing:
Jim: "From a DBA prospective this is more trouble than its worth, often the data in the database is not as straight-forward as a user would expect. Often someone will need to define views of the data so that it is understandable to a user. Also, other issues like connectivity to the database and security hamper your ability to get the data. In larger companies this can cause your DBA staff to spend a large portion of their time troubleshooting these issues instead of working on projects or managing your SQL Server databases."
I’m NOT picking on Jim – but it really got me thinking about whether there is some cross-over point where it really is easier to just create the reports, vs. giving users access to the underlying information (as Jim suggests). Or, is it easier, better, less costly in the longer-term if you provide users with the ability to pull their own reports and get their own information?
I can certainly see where you’d have to educate and support whatever access methods you provide, and I can make a case for not making that more complicated than it needs to be lest you give yourself more work and more support challenges than if you’d just setup what people specifically need.
But… when do you make the choice to focus, in the short-term, on getting people the tools they need to do the queries, reporting and drill-down type work themselves?
Just had me thinking… and realizing there’s no easy, ready answer, but I think before you shut down direct access, you should probably have an idea in your own mind about where that line is and how you evaluate it.
Featured White Paper(s)
MS SQL Server – An Overview
Whether you’re running a small business that’s ready to take the next step in its growth or an SMB that’s ready to “grow into… (read more)
An Enterprise Approach to Protecting Critical Data
Applications and databases form the core of an organizations information technology infrastructure. Without the business proc… (read more)