Well... the parser isn't nearly so complex as SQL... it is only parsing a single statement. In the end they want us to move all our data retrieval to the other department's system. Data warehousing it is basically what we have been doing.

That and sometimes the data is used so infrequently that it isn't really worth storing it locally and wasting all the space...

So, in the long run this is the best way, as the other system gets more of the data we need and improves the speed of their system, more and more will be retrieved from them directly. Edit By single statement I mean of course the part that makes up a single column return in an SQL query... so really it is just simple math and function calls, there is a lot more to SQL than that :)