I've done reports like this in Access before, and it's perfectly fine for this purpose.<BR><BR>But they will be running SQL Server 2005 on the back end.

I'm new at this whole DBA thing, so maybe this is totally standard practice.But we have a software vendor that wants remote access to our SQL server at an admin level to setup and install software ...

The APIs would automatically be queryable, albeit arguably not joinable with the elegance that SQL affords. But these two services, like most, don’t present a unified interface to their APIs.