I very much appreciate any help I can get for this. Thank you in advance for your time to read and hopefully respond.
I work for a national/government health service. In this country there exists a new national system (let's refer to it as System X or SysX) that is to be implemented. Basically the government have chosen this as the system that every authority should implement. It is not mandatory. But it is as close to mandatory as it is possible to be. The driving factor is cost. If any authority chooses to implement the national system, it would in all likelihood prove to be the cheapest option.
My goal: To gather technical evidence that could be used to argue a case to either: remain with our current option, or move to an entirely different system.
My concerns:
The database engine that our current system is built on is MS SQL Server :) We have a multitude of sp's, udf's, jobs etc. We report using MS SSRS and that works beautifully. Approx 450 bespoke reports have been developed (by a team of 3) in the last 2 years.
SysX is built on a proprietary db engine :(
The suppliers are very unlikely to give us access to a database schema and I have doubts if one even exists. Even if they gave us a schema I don't know how useful it would be given it's not MS, Oracle (wash your mouth out!) etc.
The national suppliers of SysX claim that we do not need to worry. The new system "supports ODBC and stored procedures". When I asked about using SSRS I was met with the blankest of expressions.
I have no experience of doing this but I believe we could connect SSIS to SysX using ODBC and make an overnight copy of the database. Then we could build SSRS on top of that database. The downside of this being the data being a day old. We could live with that for the most part.
Sorry that I am not asking a specific question here. I would really just like to hear people's thoughts on it. Especially those who have experienced anything similar. Advice would be most welcome.
thanks and kind regards
Paul.
