alt Hacker News> I've always advocated for having a read only database connection to be available for your customers to make their own visualisations.
Roughly three decades ago, that *was* the norm. One of the more popular tools for achieving that was Crystal Reports[1].
In the late 90s, it was almost routine for software vendors to bundle Crystal Reports with their software (very similar to how the MSSQL installer gets invoked by products), then configure an ODBC data source which connected to the appropriate database.
In my opinion, the primary stumbling block of this approach was the lack of a shared SQL query repository. So if you weren’t intimately aware with the data model you wanted to work with, you’d lose hours trying to figure it out on your own or rely on your colleagues sharing it via sneakernet or email.
Crystal Reports has since been acquired by SAP, and I haven’t touched it since the early ‘00s so I don’t know what it looks or functions like today.