Microsoft on Monday said that it has acquired ActiveViews, a privately held company with five employees, for an undisclosed sum. ActiveViews makes a software tool that lets businesspeople--those who aren't database experts--query databases and generate reports. Microsoft said it intends to add the ActiveViews software to the reporting services software that's already part of the company's SQL Server database.
Typically, database specialists are the people who generate reports, pulling up specific collections of data, such as a tally of daily sales numbers for a given region. ActiveViews is designed to allow any employee to view the contents of a database and pull out needed information, Microsoft said in a statement.