Apologies for mentioning MySQL, I'm less familiar with PostgreSQL.

Is the date manipulation issue that much more cumbersome with SQL than perl? 

select period_diff(extract(year_month from date1), extract(year_month 
+from date2)) as month_spread from foo;

[download]

I guess a big consideration for this is whether the data is allowed to be a little stale, in which case you don't need any complex technology and can simply periodically recreate tables in the db via a scheduled perl job.

If it does need to be 'on demand' (i.e. someone hitting refresh in Excel needs/wants/expects the *live* data rather than something 5 mins old) then this might be accomplished with a db trigger which shells out to run a perl script to repopulate a table. Although the HTTP route might still be better here I guess.

It also depends on data set sizes, time to run the 'report', etc.

In reply to Re^3: Excel automatically pulling data from Perl? by jbert
in thread Excel automatically pulling data from Perl? by tilly

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