Not really. It's a clever idea, but I think views tend to be too permanent. We use them extensively, of course, in all of our enterprise dbs. We've got almost 100 reports that have been converted to this tool already, and they use views as their data sources, but those are for what I'd classify as operational reports. Truly ad hoc queries are typically to support research requests, (e.g. government inquiries) and tend to be one time or very occasional use. Users may export to excel, or they may make a web report and run with it. We hope that they'll have a coder write sql for the operational ones, to make sure that they perform well. In most cases the ad-hoc queries are already against views that our developers have created to begin with.
Views often also require special/elevated permissions to create. Another concern is database portability. Views in mysql take some uncomfortable file system access, I've heard, and it might be hard to create database agnostic view creation interface. Thanks for the thoughts though. P.S. I don't want to clog this list any further with a single project specific issue, but I welcome ideas and collaboration on this project. Forena is nearing beta release, and I'm getting pretty excited about it's potential. Meet me in the issue queue for more info. Dave On Jul 16, 2010, at 7:20 AM, Earnie Boyd wrote: > David Metzler wrote: >> >> Regarding Views: > > Have you considered creating database views for your user created ad-hoc > query? Then the reporting is ready to go and the next user can leverage on > an already created view. > > -- > Earnie > -- http://progw.com > -- http://www.for-my-kids.com
