I know there's been many questions about SQL front ends, but I have some specific requirements I haven't seen addressed.
I'm an intern for a company with a large database and I've been tasked with creating a front end so people with no SQL experience can query the database. The company uses SQL Server 2008 R2, but a lot of the users need some sort of front end application.
They shouldn't be able to update tables or anything like that, just read from the database and ask for specific information.
They currently have a program to do this, but the two problems are it's written in C# and they don't have anybody that really knows C# (I do, but am only here for the summer.), and the queries are not efficient enough, as they have a very large database and very many people accessing it, and so it's having a major impact on performance.
The front end that they want has to be able to be supported after I leave, so they don't want it in C#. I'm not sure if there's any program for creating interfaces that could be easily done with no programming experience, but that seems to rule out a lot of possibilities. The other possibilities seem to be some sort of open-source project, or access.
Access seems like a good bet because it's easy to use for people who would be accessing it, and also it seems easy to set up. The question is how optimized would these queries be? Would the SQL code resulting from this be fast? Especially because the users don't know anything about that. Does Access handle this itself? Is there a way for us to influence what Access outputs when users input things?
Are there any other open-source applications that could be used for these purposes? As I said, efficiency of the queries is very key, as well as being able to be supported without much experience with programming.