queries and reporting from corporative database non IT staff

Hi! we have no Business Intelligence solution in my job and the general manager asked for a query and reports system where he (and other section managers and non IT staff) could query the corporative database (we work in healthcare, so it's mostly about patients, clinic histories, treatments) so I will propose them SQL SERVER 2005. I'll tell you my general idea and maybe you could tell me if I'm right: Through Integration Services we will load our data from the corporative database (it's Borland's InterBase) and generate a datawarehouse (now we don't have a datawarehouse) then through Reporting Services we can query this datawarehouse to generate different reports (this reports can be generated for non-technical staff, but staff who knows quite a lot about for example the different treatments that different groups of patients follow, so this staff may want to query about which patients followed which treatment in a period of time and generate by himself a report about that). And through Analysis Services we could (in a future) generate some OLAP solutions, Data Mining etc

But for the query and report system it could be enough to start with Integration Services and Reporting Services? it's very important for this system to work efficiently in terms of time: the non-technical staff generates the query and in seconds receives the report result... some of this non IT staff who will use the system knows exactly which information we house in each InterBase table, so through this system they would like to generate their own queries and reports (this is a different level of non-IT staff who is in between a Medical doctor and a Software engineer, this staff does have some technical background specially in SQL.

So my idea is to have an SQL SERVER 2005 to which this staff gets connected via LAN (all this system runs locally in one corporative place, will not run through Internet) feeded by the InterBase corporative database and delivering efficiently queries and reports... is this possible? could I test this using the trial free 6 months version? and after that if everything's working fine how much will I have to pay for 15 persons to access the SQL SERVER 2005 for keeping using the system?

This sounds like a good solution. I believe there are three stages of data presentation at a company: Data storage and retrieval, a good reporting strategy, and then Business Intelligence. SQL Server 2005 contains all the tools you need to do all three. The engine (and good application programming) handles number one, SSIS and Reporting Services handles number two, and the new Analysis Services handles number three.

You can read more about what I think on this here:

http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=sqlserver&seqNum=159&rl=1

If this answers your question, make sure to mark it "answered" so that others can quickly locate it.

Buck Woody
http://www.buckwoody.com

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Thanks!! just one question to get the general idea: in the Data storage and retrieval part is when you create the datawarehouse? so the original data is somehow "rearranged" for the Reporting Services to query the data more efficiently..

I don't understand how the data is queried efficiently

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Good question - if you'll check out my series of articles I referenced in the last post, you'll see that the data warehouse is a different structure than your data store. I think you can get the reports you're looking for out of the ODS layer I talk about. Check out those articles and I think you'll find what you're looking for.

Buck