We have a similar issue arising and what we decided was to mirror the database the users want to query so they are not dealing with "real time" or production.. it gets mirrored twice a day 12pm and 12am so they have near realtime data. Since its on the NAS it doesn't take long to mirror it. As for the user interface we are working with BIRT so they can connect to the database, select objects and make the report easier for them so they don't really have to know SQL. If someone wants to run SQL there is the SQL scratch pad (eclipse app). We are planning to make our own "application" to run on eclipse so it has standard reports and the sql scratch pad. Of course they only have read capabilities. The user interface isn't complete so we still have COTS tools that they call the help desk to get a report run. We have some "power users" that have the COTS tool on their PC and run the reports themselves.
Does this help? -----Original Message----- From: Ian Skinner [mailto:h...@ilsweb.com] Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 10:35 AM To: cf-community Subject: YIKES! I must let internet users write SQL queries for our database! Cross post from cf-talk for those of you who may not monitor that list as this is not necessarily a ColdFusion issue at this point. Did I get your attention? Luckily these are read-only queries, but still! I have a meeting this afternoon to discuss reworking/developing an interface to allow anonymous, anybody in the world, users to develop add hock queries on a respectably large database. This database gets about 2.5 million transactions, and growing, a year and has been around since 1973. It is public data, so we need to provide public access to it. We would like it to be self service public access so the public can stop bothering us for the data and we can spend more time on fun projects :) There is currently a form based interface, but it has serious limitations and is no longer serving its role well. So this meeting is to discuss what to do about this and how much time and effort it might take. I am soliciting you all for ideas I may be overlooking on possible solutions and|or gotcha's for something like this. So fire away please. Thank You Ian ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;207172674;29440083;f Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:295789 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
