Are we solving the problem right?

Are we solving the right problem?

Jeff asked why use xp_cmdshell to get to a third-party tool & suggested db_sendmail: depending on your environment, the answer to that first question is either "No" or "Right enough" 🙂

I wonder if composing html <table>s and emailing them is the right way to share content.

(aside from the pretty/ugly formatting of inline style workarounds for various capabilities of mail client(s) such as gmail stripping style tags and even inline attributes google decided aren't appropriate for your email or Outlook 2007/2010 using Word to render emails)

If the data is meant to be further consumed, the html table is somewhat klunky. If the data is meant to be looked at, there is too much requirement for 'pretty' to make emailed tables a robust solution. If the data is meant to be proof that something else happened, does it need to provide so much detail (and cost the overhead to get all that detail, formatted, etc.)?

If the data were staged for consumption by a data-query in Excel (for example) the analyst using it would be able to easily further transform via charting/pivoting/filtering, etc. If reporting services (either MS, or 3rd party such as Crystal Reports/Crystal Solutions) generates the 'pretty' version to a PDF - that could be mailed/attached/referenced. Another option might be to simply render the data to html via a web service: properly executed CSS can make a nice view for direct human eyes-on or the semantically correct table can be consumed by Excel's html table import (or googledocs html scraping equivalent)

Another consideration is the amount of content we _can_ get from a query may be much more than we _should_ put in an email. I know, nobody intends to put 30k rows of data in an email... When we built and tested there was only 200 rows in the table... 3 years later we're causing grief to the email administrator when we're storing an html version of the day's snapshot in 12 email recipient's inbox. (and 10 of those recipients keep everything we've ever mailed in "archive" folders on the email server) I'm not sure if this qualifies as Database Backup, but you can see how well it scales. 🙂