Jack Corbett (7/20/2009)
I understood you to mean that you could have several different ways the manager wants to look at the data. If it is only those 2 then I would do as Steve has suggested.To be honest, I have always preferred to write static reports for specific purposes. This way you can more easily optimize the T-SQL.
It's possible...One minute he wants one thing and then 2 years later he could decide he wants something completely different 😛
In general though, the data can really be seen on 4 levels: customer, item category, item subcategory, and item. So there are potentially 4 of them in the specific case I'm working on now. I'd kind of like to set up a best practice sort of thing though, for all of my future reports because that's really a lot of my job and it's not something that's ever been done very well here.
I definitely see your point about optimization though. At least you've both given me a good bit to chew on 😀