Before investing in any software or service, it's important to have a clear understanding on its' purpose. Or...what problem is the software solving?
Having been in the Information Technology industry since 1988, one of the things we noticed was there was no standard tools or processes for retrieving data. Functionality embedded in off-the-shelf software was often quirky and product specific; reporting tools (e.g. Crystal Reports) still required the talents of an I.T. worker to implement; and, DBAs (DataBase Administrators) were scared to death to provide ad-hoc query tools to end-users for fear of end users killing the performance of production databases.
This problem is wide-spread and has a long history.
The Hunter Client is an "end-user" ad-hoc query tool that protects both the end-user and the I.T. infrastructure. With its' drag and drop query builder (see below), the Hunter Client is easy to learn and implement. In addition, the query builder's implementation is consistent across databases, so once an end-user learns how to use the query builder for LIMS data...then they know how to use for specification data, order data, sales data, etc.
But what about those DBAs who don't want end-users' queries adversely impacting the performance of the database?
The Hunter Client has an additional set of functionality called "required criteria". In essence, a Hunter Client application can be configured not to run a query unless the end-user supplies some sort of critical criteria, such as an order number or date range, etc. This functionality eliminates the "oops" factor...."Oops, I didn't mean to run that query!!!"
In addition, the Hunter Client protects both the end-user and DBA by requiring absolutely no knowledge of the database details in order to run queries. Check out a future blog post for details on how the Hunter Client accomplishes this task.