I will be taking on a new project developing a web-based "reporting system".
The first requirement I got from BI group is "we just want to look at the
data". Basically, there is a huge database, and they want certain people to
be able to drill down to the data they want, perhaps a few graphs here and
there, and then extract selected data to an Excel file or a flat file for
further analysis. As of now there are a handful of parameters that they want
to filter on.
My question is for something straight forward as this, is it worth going
into Crystal or any other reporting tool? I never had a good experience with
Crystal; and their export to Excel option in .NET version renders an excel
file useless for any further data analysis (it does bunch of cell merges and
who knows what else). Is there any other reporting tool easy to use and
program against that can accomplish these requirements (especially export to
Excel feature). Or should I just develop my own web application with
DataGrids and some charting components? I would really appreciate to hear
your opinions.
Thank you in advance.Do you have a SQL Server license? If so, you should get SQL Server
Reporting Services a try as you'll have a license for it also. As far
as Reporting Tools go - it's not too bad.
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/reporting/default.asp
Scott
http://www.OdeToCode.com/blogs/scott/
On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 22:40:50 -0500, "LP" <lp@.a.com> wrote:
>Hi,
>I will be taking on a new project developing a web-based "reporting system"
.
>The first requirement I got from BI group is "we just want to look at the
>data". Basically, there is a huge database, and they want certain people to
>be able to drill down to the data they want, perhaps a few graphs here and
>there, and then extract selected data to an Excel file or a flat file for
>further analysis. As of now there are a handful of parameters that they wan
t
>to filter on.
>My question is for something straight forward as this, is it worth going
>into Crystal or any other reporting tool? I never had a good experience wit
h
>Crystal; and their export to Excel option in .NET version renders an excel
>file useless for any further data analysis (it does bunch of cell merges an
d
>who knows what else). Is there any other reporting tool easy to use and
>program against that can accomplish these requirements (especially export t
o
>Excel feature). Or should I just develop my own web application with
>DataGrids and some charting components? I would really appreciate to hear
>your opinions.
>Thank you in advance.
>
Here's a great alternative to ActiveReports:
http://www.datadynamics.com/default.aspx
"LP" <lp@.a.com> wrote in message
news:%238T16bkEFHA.1012@.TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...
> Hi,
> I will be taking on a new project developing a web-based "reporting
> system".
> The first requirement I got from BI group is "we just want to look at the
> data". Basically, there is a huge database, and they want certain people
> to
> be able to drill down to the data they want, perhaps a few graphs here and
> there, and then extract selected data to an Excel file or a flat file for
> further analysis. As of now there are a handful of parameters that they
> want
> to filter on.
> My question is for something straight forward as this, is it worth going
> into Crystal or any other reporting tool? I never had a good experience
> with
> Crystal; and their export to Excel option in .NET version renders an excel
> file useless for any further data analysis (it does bunch of cell merges
> and
> who knows what else). Is there any other reporting tool easy to use and
> program against that can accomplish these requirements (especially export
> to
> Excel feature). Or should I just develop my own web application with
> DataGrids and some charting components? I would really appreciate to hear
> your opinions.
> Thank you in advance.
>
"LP" <lp@.a.com> wrote in news:#8T16bkEFHA.1012@.TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl:
> My question is for something straight forward as this, is it worth
> going into Crystal or any other reporting tool? I never had a good
> experience with Crystal;
Biggest problem with crystal is that reports are limited to ~50,000
database rows. Any queries that return > 50,000 rows will kill IIS +
Crystal.
To get around this limitation, you'll have to do all your calculations on
the server end and return a nicely formatted result set. This may or may
not be a good solution depending on how beefy your SQL server is.
Lucas Tam (REMOVEnntp@.rogers.com)
Please delete "REMOVE" from the e-mail address when replying.
[url]http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/
spot18/[/url]Make sure you read the RS newsgroups before making the jump. From what I've
been reading, RS has more than its fair share of problems exporting to
Excel. Remember, it's a 1.0 product and it usually takes MS a few releases
before they have something stable and feature complete.
"Scott Allen" <scott@.nospam.odetocode.com> wrote in message
news:h59011lrggtu2hmqdva185orm54guitprr@.
4ax.com...
> Do you have a SQL Server license? If so, you should get SQL Server
> Reporting Services a try as you'll have a license for it also. As far
> as Reporting Tools go - it's not too bad.
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/sql/reporting/default.asp
> --
> Scott
> http://www.OdeToCode.com/blogs/scott/
> On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 22:40:50 -0500, "LP" <lp@.a.com> wrote:
>
system".
to
and
want
with
excel
and
to
>
I agree that Crystal sounds like overkill for your requirements.
Why not cut to the chase and export directly to Excel?
Here are some examples:
http://SteveOrr.net/Articles/ExcelExport.aspx
http://SteveOrr.net/Articles/ExportPanel.aspx
http://SteveOrr.net/export.aspx
I hope this helps,
Steve C. Orr, MCSD, MVP
http://SteveOrr.net
"LP" <lp@.a.com> wrote in message
news:%238T16bkEFHA.1012@.TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...
> Hi,
> I will be taking on a new project developing a web-based "reporting
> system".
> The first requirement I got from BI group is "we just want to look at the
> data". Basically, there is a huge database, and they want certain people
> to
> be able to drill down to the data they want, perhaps a few graphs here and
> there, and then extract selected data to an Excel file or a flat file for
> further analysis. As of now there are a handful of parameters that they
> want
> to filter on.
> My question is for something straight forward as this, is it worth going
> into Crystal or any other reporting tool? I never had a good experience
> with
> Crystal; and their export to Excel option in .NET version renders an excel
> file useless for any further data analysis (it does bunch of cell merges
> and
> who knows what else). Is there any other reporting tool easy to use and
> program against that can accomplish these requirements (especially export
> to
> Excel feature). Or should I just develop my own web application with
> DataGrids and some charting components? I would really appreciate to hear
> your opinions.
> Thank you in advance.
>
>Any queries that return > 50,000 rows will kill IIS +
> Crystal.
that's really good to know. I can see them wanting to export all data for
1st quater which is about that record count.
As far as MS Reporting services from what I saw it is truely is MS version 1
product.
I am leaning towards just developing straight forward web application and my
own export to Excel functionality.
Thank you all!
MS Reporting Services allows the user to dynamically drill down on related
data and create simple graphs, etc. It would take a great deal of effort to
duplicate that functionality on your own. I would reccomend using RS for ad
hoc decision support queries, and then parallel to that could be some more
presentation quality reports that you implement yourself using Crystal or
ASP.
"LP" <lp@.a.com> wrote in message
news:OICquiqEFHA.3368@.TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
>
> that's really good to know. I can see them wanting to export all data for
> 1st quater which is about that record count.
> As far as MS Reporting services from what I saw it is truely is MS version
1
> product.
> I am leaning towards just developing straight forward web application and
my
> own export to Excel functionality.
> Thank you all!
>
The biggest issue with Crystal running on a server is that the crystal
components keep leaking memory and it leaves the server crawling after
some time (at least that's what we have encountered on our server). It
is alright with a client-server app where crystal is running on the
client side in which case the memory gets released as soon as the
client app exits.
Apart from that there are issues with deploying it - it works on some
systems and fails with some license issue on others (I have also posted
this issue and of course, there was no response). There are numerous
posts regarding this issue and its resolution but one thing is clear
that there is no clear cut resolution to that.
Given the lack of support on Crystal I would advise for a home grown
system or RS (I am sure it will only improve with time).
--rk
The thing that makes Crystal Reports confusing is that there are sooo many
versions of it out there and you never know which version someone is talking
about in these posts.
Here is my take on things: CR.NET is considered an upsell product. Thus, you
get it free in the box with the hopes that you'll upgrade. Given that, the
retail versions are much better. The latest version of Crystal, XI, has many
upgrades and bug fixes and the report processing performance has been
improved and has better exporting. All around it's a much better product.
Unfortunately, CR.NET 2003 isn't such a hot product and continues to give CR
a bad name. Of course, CR isn't perfect - no question about that. But
without a doubt the latest version XI is a big step forward. Plus, they have
it available as a free 30 day download on their site.
The problem I have with RS is that it is a 1.0 product and it has a lot of
problems, but people recommend it like it's reporting nirvana. I've yet to
use a MS 1.0 product and have it run without a hitch (or any company's
product for that matter). Reporting Services is great if you want to do
simple reports and are willing to do lots of manual coding to fill in the
gaps that MS left out. I see people on the newsgroups saying, "RS is great!
You need to try it out. I got my reports to run in no time." Everything is
great when you run a few wizards. But then when you dig a little deeper into
the feature set you see questions like, "Hey, I want to do X and it won't do
it. Why not?"; "Why do my Excel/PDF exports keep getting screwed up?"; "Why
is SQL Server performance so slow now?"; "How do I make it read from a
DataSet?" and "Why does it cost $20K to support ASP.NET Forms
Authentication?" There are usually three common answers to these questions:
1) Write your own custom extensions, 2) Rewrite your stored procedures to do
all the work RS won't do, and 3) Wait for a future version. Let's hope your
customers are patient while you do all this extra coding or wait till it
gets fixed in a future version. Plus, if you plan on doing any heavy
reporting with it then you need to put it on a separate server ($5K license)
or else your SQL box will get hammered b/c it is resource intensive. It's
only free for companies that don't have much SQL activity.
All in all, I think RS definitely makes a lot of aspects of writing reports
easier. In fact, the Table object is pretty damn stellar and nothing else
compares to it. RS is a great tool that can crank out a lot of reports very
fast. But it's a 1.0 product that is still missing a lot of features. I've
seen NG posts from people saying, "I convinced my manager/client to go with
RS and now it doesn't do the things I assumed would work. Someone help!" The
answer is "it will be fixed in a future release". RS still needs a few more
versions under its belt before it can be recommended carte blanche to
everyone.
"rk" <krakesh@.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1108419323.164312.146330@.g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> The biggest issue with Crystal running on a server is that the crystal
> components keep leaking memory and it leaves the server crawling after
> some time (at least that's what we have encountered on our server). It
> is alright with a client-server app where crystal is running on the
> client side in which case the memory gets released as soon as the
> client app exits.
> Apart from that there are issues with deploying it - it works on some
> systems and fails with some license issue on others (I have also posted
> this issue and of course, there was no response). There are numerous
> posts regarding this issue and its resolution but one thing is clear
> that there is no clear cut resolution to that.
> Given the lack of support on Crystal I would advise for a home grown
> system or RS (I am sure it will only improve with time).
> --rk
>
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