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Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else have the problem of teaching SQL to business people who aren't necessarily that technical but still need to run reports?

I have found direct access to run queries is a very powerful tool but teaching SQL is tough to people who are not that technical.

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I also keep running into this. I spent several years working in the "business intelligence" field. This essentially involved me using a reporting tool of some kind and writing SQL for business people that didn't know how. I never got to do any actual analysis like I wanted because I was too backlogged with report requests from the less technical.

I think SQL is something every business analyst should know how to write. It's an extremely powerful tool.

Not myself directly, but my cube mate had this problem before he left for greener pastures.

There was no resolution. He tried to teach them SQL, however when that failed he fell back on at least trying to get the Cognos scripts under SVN. He left two weeks ago, and just last week I overheard a conversation along the lines of:

"He showed me this Tortoise thing, but when I hit update everything has red next to it. It used to be green, but no matter what I do it stays red."

At this point, I don't even know what could have been done. He was probably working on this for his entire employment here, which was close to a year.

I find a lot of the issues are a bit beyond the syntax as well. Looking to pivot or otherwise manipulate the data which require advanced query and data analysis skills. It does help to show that their reports aren't always as simple as they think.

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