>>>I'm working in a a place so locked down they want me to use SSRS to extract some data and export to another system but .
>>>
>>>I can't have access to the data or even a test version.
>>>
>>>A quote
>>>
>>>yes but thinking about it we shouldn’t have copies of finance data anywhere apart from live or test servers! you may have to develop “blind” and then ask the DBA team to deploy to UAT for you to test?
>>>
>>>WTF
>>
>>Where is this company located, back in the USSR? :-)
>
>My bet is US or UK. I've seen various degrees of paranoia in these countries, much less in others. Bordering on "you will paint a portrait of this lady but for security reasons you must not know how she looks". The actual span between the extremes (friendly vs paranoid) is that one thing (put the executable in place, build a connectstring, have it run as scheduled task) may take between two hours and six months.

I'm at the 6 month end . I just did something that I thought was going to take a couple of days it ended up taking a couple of months. Weirdly this is a very well paid task but I am wondering how long I can stand it.

The most annoying part is that the actual client (Finance) are nice people and easy to work with but the IT department are a bunch of PITA. The other day IT where moaning about access databases and excel macros. To me those thing are empowering for the user and a fact of life so you may as well accept them and see what benefit you can get . Often they help the customer spec out what they actually need with a little trial and error.