This wouldn't be possible in a lot of the projects I work on. The problem is privileges -- for example, the data you can see depends on whether you're logged i

This wouldn't be possible in a lot of the projects I work on. The problem is privileges -- for example, the data you can see depends on whether you're logged in or not, and your group and role when logged in. What I've done instead is provided an interface (bookmarkable) to a set of "rowsets", where the rowset has a name and set of columns, where the columns are filterable, sortable, and/or selectable. Directly behind the rowset is SQL, of course (and/or a view or table), so it's not that much less flexible than SQL directly, but it provides a point where additional filter conditions can be reliably added to enforce privileges (there's also a dev option to see the SQL, if that's needed).