Hello all-

I'm not a .Net C# guy I just write reports. I've been writing Crystal reports against a SQL server (tables and views) for 10 years. We just started a new project and one thing they would like to do is HIDE the database from everyone (including me) They want to expose datasets at runtime the the reports will be able to pull the data from and make it seemless.

database -- > exposed database object  --> reports

Basically a layer between the reports and the physical database itself. This will be in .Net and CR 2008. I've tinkered with a few different things, running the data out to XML and reading the XML fie with the report for example but everything I try I either get errors or very very poor performance 

Is there an ideal way to access data from a SQL server without actually being able to see the SQL server?

Sorry if this is a stupid request, I've been doing the same thing the same way for so long that I'm struggling.

Thanks for any hep / links you can give me.

(my responce to them was to hide the native tables with security but to allow VIEWS to be exposed as read only objects as Crystal to me has always seemed to work better with direct connection to the data. However, they do not want the VIEWS exposed either. Just looking for a solution.

Thanks a lot.