Question

I’m looking for common patterns of implementing ad-hoc querying capabilites graphically. I’ve looked at SQL query builders in Access and TOAD, but I’m interested if anyone is aware of products that have build such a tool against a domain specific data warehouse (e.g. clinical databases).

Thanks,

Answer 1

I have no specific answer but there are reporting tools that help you do stuff that I think you might be interested in.

One pay one that I tried out myself and liked quiet a bit was Tableau It is pay software and the server can be expensive, but I liked the desktop app. You will have to know enough database to figure out how to draw data out of it. Once that is done though you can reuse it. Once you draw out the dataset though you can ‘play’ with it graphically.

You can get into more complicated Reporting tools like Crystal Reports, Jasper Report and I think IBM has something that deals with ‘Cubes’ or whatever. You can look up all that by looking into Business Intelligence software. (I hate that name)

The problem with having domain specific stuff is that databases can be different. And even if you use a common vendor tool then the the query tool would have to be built specific to the db.

So maybe this doesn’t answer your direct question but hope it is a little helpful.