Crystal Enterprise v Centura Report Writer

[Turkbear]

Hi,
Anyone out there used both of these tools and, if so, can you give me a comparison ( Ease of use, ability to create complex reports, etc), especially in the area of web distribution and scheduling.

I'm only asking in the CE forum since many of you also use CR and I do not want to cross-post.

We have one business area that insists that Crystal is not powerful enough and does not offer as much formatting ability as Centura's ( I believe actually Gupta's) product.

Yes, No, Maybe, It Depends...

Thanks for any insight ..

 

[synapsevampire]

Define complex reports.

Crystal owns the market, largely because of it's flexibility.

I doubt that you'll find many people here using Centura.

My approach to building reporting systems is to use database objects, suich as Views and SPs, and let the presentation layer do as little of the grunt work as possible in case you'd like to change later, and to insulate the clients from database changes.

-k

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
My thoughts exactly..Let the database do most, if not all, of the work.
The business unit in question is going to give me an example or 2 of what they think Crystal cannot handle..I bet Dollars to Doughnuts we can get it to work better in Crystal..

Thanks Synapse...

 

[synapsevampire]

I hadn't even noticed that it was you posting, Turk.

I've every confidence that you'll prove Crystal more useful, however as you know the query facilities within are weak, and the drill down and slice and dice aren't the best of breed when compared to OLAP specific tools.

I'm watching MS Reporting Services very carefully as they have a very inexpensive and flexible model.

Let's read of your findings, sounds interesting.

-k

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
I will be happy to follow up when I find out more..
So far we have been very happy with Crystal's ability to produce what we need - especially when we can pre-create a data source ( an Oracle table or View) that is already optimised for the report.
We have couple of dozen reports that required tree-walking up a parent-child reflexive join that needed Oracle's Hierarchical query ability ( better than Crystal's) to provide the data we needed so we use a parameter gathering page for user input, pass it to an Oracle SP ( that also gets data from several joined tables and sub-queries) which creates a unique key and inserts a set of rows into an existing table ( using a sequence number as the indexed key field) - the Crystal reports that use this table are passed that key as the only parameter so that the correct rows are retreived for the report. By using a pre-defined table that contains all the fields that any of the related reports need, we avoid having to do any mods to the reports when creating the new data rows since the MetaData has not changed.
Given this ability, as well as Crystal's own strengths, I cannot imagine we can't replicate ( if not improve) what any other reporting solution can do.

I too am curious about the MS stuff, but once the investment in CE and looking at the future BO integrated services, it would have to offer a lot to effect a change..(It might be a good alternative for new installations, however, due to the cost factor)