Consider five spreadsheets containing data about Customers, Addresses, Products, Revenues and Sales People. 

Now -  "Find me the Addresses of all of our Customers that have bought more than $10,000 of our Product and tell me who the Salespeople were and where they live".

Excel doesn't allow you to answer this kind of question very easily so people are forced to write macros or spend unnecessary time cutting and pasting.

Let's say the same data is held in five Oracle tables - now the Business User has to write SQL or use a Graphical Wizard - it can be done but it all takes time.

Or some of the data is now in two spreadsheets and the rest in three Oracle tables - how is the Business User going to solve this problem?

SDS lets the Business User ask and answer any question that spans these data sources - in seconds - not only does this mean a much faster time to answer any one question or generate a report, but it opens up new ways of exploring large volumes of data in real time.