You start with a pig. Two big ears, each one covered with stiff bristley hairs. Two beady eyes. A long snout with an upturned nose displaying two large, widely spaced nostrils, and, under that, a mouth which can take in and chew up just about anything. Not much of a neck, and no shoulders to speak of. Four cloven hooves at the ends of short legs. A rounded belly, and a curly tail. Those are the parts of the pig we can see. Then inside of your average pig are intestines and lungs, and a stomach and a heart, and probably some things with fancier names, like an esophagus and an appendix. Now between that pig -- pink or black or brown or a little of each -- and your breakfast sausage are a lot of steps that you probably don't want to know about and certainly don't want to be involved in personally. You just want to know there was a pig (preferably healthy), and now there is juicy tasty sausage.
Getting information about your own business is just about the same process as going from pig to breakfast link. There is data (preferably accurate), and lots of it, stored away inside of your systems. And at the end of the day, you would like to have some nice juicy reports for your own uses and perhaps to send on to clients or potential business partners. (If you send reports out by mail, you might consider enclosing some locally produced sausage to ensure they are met with a smile on the other end). You don't really want to know in detail what happens between data and report, you just want it to happen, and you want the reports to come out looking good and containing all the information you need. And you really don't want to be personally involved in every step of the process which takes the raw data from your servers and, bit by bit, formats, organizes, edits, selects, highlights, and otherwise butchers it. You don't want to fight different interfaces and different compatibilities and different formats and all the issues which come along with doing these projects by hand.
In short, you have a SQL server database, and you want SQL reports -- without getting your hands dirty, and without being dragged into yet another conversation about why your macros won't transition properly. You can dig into the intestines and stomach lining and liver and kidneys and get blood all over your hands and up to your elbows -- or you can get a good quality SQL reporting and document generation software to take care of the messy bits for you. Getting from SQL server data to a SQL report requires a good bit of mucking about, and some of the reporting software available these days can take a lot of the dirty work out of generating SQL reports.
There are a few basic things you want from your SQL report software. First of all, no pig should make the butcher buy a whole new set of knives -- the SQL report software should work seamlessly with the user interfaces to which your employees are accustomed. Second, cutting up the pig shouldn't take so long that the meat rots -- you want your SQL reports to be generated quickly and efficiently -- pages per second, not seconds per page. You want to be able to make kielbasa or hot dogs or weisswurst -- your software should enable you to create SQL reports in any of the widely used popular document formats. And just as some sausages are relatively simple to make and others result from terribly complicated processes, you want to be able to make complex queries of your software. Finally, the process of making sausage should be like magic, not like pulling fingernails -- you want software with a wizard to guide you through the process of creating SQL reports. And if you could get an unlimited number of sausages from one pig, like you can get unlimited SQL reports from new software, well, then you'd be just about in hog heaven.
Those who like to see the lining of pigs' intestines and otherwise love to dig in to dirty work can still try to generate reports from their SQL server databases manually. Mind-numbingly obtuse instructions for doing so are available online on sites like (http://www.colestock.com/blogs/2008/04/how-to-generate-reports-against-oracle.html); or you could buy a How-to-Cut-Your-Own-Pig guide (http://www.amazon.com/Easy-Oracle-SQL-Started-Writing/dp/0972751378); or you could save yourself a lot of time, energy, frustration, and perhaps even disgust, by purchasing software to create SQL reports for your company instead. SQL reports are sausage. We all want our sausage to be of a consistently high quality, without too much mucking about.
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