Many times your customers may want reports that combine data from different sources.  For instance, maybe you need to get your customer data from ERP data and that data comes from a web service.  That customer data needs to be combined with the data from your Project Management Software, stored in a database.  Another scenario may be when you want to report off of 2 different databases, say Access and Oracle.  This article focuses on something similar to the first scenario, but there can be other scenarios this may apply to.

There are many ways to combine different data sources for reporting.  The tools to do this are varied.  One could do a lot of this in the web service itself, combining the data.  I do not believe that is most effective for most enterprise reporting.

In using these different tools I came across Business Objects Business View Manager.  This is part of the Business Objects Enterprise software that contains many other components. 

In this article we will show how to connect to a web service and to a SQL Server database.  We will use Business Objects Business Views to combine and link the web service to the Database.  In this first part we will go over setting up the database and creating the web service used as a data source.