This sounds lazy...but please bear with me – are there any simple reporting tools available that will run on Windows that can talk to SQL Server? Sounds easy, I should be spoilt for choice eh?

I’m a grizzled IT veteran – I know all about relational database design, implementation, covering indexes, query plans, query optimisation, window functions – you name it, I’ve likely done it.

I just want a simple lightweight reporting tool (emphasis on the simple) that I can enter a SQL query into, and the query will run against a live data source (comparatively tiny data volumes by modern standards), and the results can be displayed either as a table, or as a chart.

That’s it – I would have expected this to be a solved problem by now; back when I was a young ‘lad, there were products like Crystal Reports, COGNOS, and so on, that could do this easily, and indeed, that level of simplicity is all I’m looking for now. I’m running a small startup and simply want to grab some basic reports, live, from our database – exporting these to PDF etc would be nice, but not required, screen-only is fine.

I’ve wasted a complete day looking for simple reporting tools, but nobody seems to do them anymore. I don’t want enterprise data connectors, embedded web servers, anything browser-based, scheduled reports, auto-emailing, pre-arranged sales-based conference calls, proprietary query languages, monthly subscriptions and so forth.

The closest I got today was linking tables from SQL Server into MS Access on O365, which almost did what I want, but adding new tables, and refreshing column lists is a frustrating pain. I tried Excel via “Get Data” – but it’s not really “for” this, and I don’t want to keep having to refresh data.

I feel like I want nano, but everyone only sells emacs :-) Many thanks in advance for any suggestions you can make.