I need assistance picking out a database that will match my reporting needs. I have designed a product for my client using an online questionnaire to obtain answers from her customers. These answers are stored in a database and they need to be subsequently retrieved into a static Word document to produce a compliance manual. The customers need to be able to download the merged document as a Word document.
What I need essentially is a glorified Merge document to be created. There are approximately 150 questions. The static document into which the answers need to be merged contains 150 pages of static text prior to being populated with the answers. Considering the answers are of various lengths, the overall document could grow to 200 pages or more. I guess the question is really how to build report with Word’s merge functionality built into it. We anticipate that 100-200 users will be accessing these reports daily.
Here is my question….if I use something like SQL Server 2000, will the built-in reporting functionality allow me to produce this type of merged document if I use a stored procedure on the server side to merge the data? Or, will I need to buy a separate reporting tool such as Crystal Reports or some other report writer and do the formatting in Crystal Reports? Will SQL Server’s functionality allow for the creation of a report that can be converted to a Word document and maintain the formatting? Would a database like mySQL combined with Crystal Reports for report writing be a more appropriate choice?