Hi All,
We are preparing to upgrade to E10 and we have a few technical people in house that are excited to get an SQL database so they can write small web apps to directly pull data out of the DB. Currently we use a Progress DB and we export some CSV reports for them, so simple web apps can parse the data and display it. We have several people that won’t use Epicor but need access to the data to do their jobs more effectively so these web apps allows them to do this(e.g. BOM reports that show qty and cost info).
I’ve been pretty agressive we can not give write access to the SQL DB, but I’m also a little leary of read access. With REST APIs now available, I’m of the opinion this is what we should be using even for read requests(our Epicor devs currently use SOAP APIs - we have the expertise in house). SQL is a lower barrier of entry than REST APIs, and that’s what scares me. I’m a little worried about potential problems that could result(e.g. could they lock a table as part of a read and cause performance problems for Epicor clients?). For context we’ve been running Epicor 9 and have a long history of performance problems and strange weird issues we don’t fully understand, so I’m a bit paranoid to lock down E10 so we ideally have a faster and more reliable system.
Am I being paranoid with arguing against giving these technical people read access to our Microsoft SQL DB? If not please help me to understand what types of problems can result so we have a better understanding.