Crytal Enterprise Comparing output from a LIVE/TEST how?

[MartinCroft]

Hi

Does anyone know is all crystal reports information written to the SQL server backend. We have CE v 9.0 I am a DBA with a little knowledge of crystal. We are in the process of moving from one technology to another and need to check that there are no differences of the crystal reports output. At a SQL side we are comparing all the tables that populate the crystal reports, but would like to be able to compare crystal output from live and test. Is all the data held within the CE90 database, would it be possible to compare these bases if live CE90 was restored to a test environment and the same reports ran on live and test or will they hold server specific details. Or is there a better approach I am sure someone must have come across similar scenarios

Mart

 

[synapsevampire]

Crystal doesn't write any of the recordsets returned to it back to a database unless you specifcally export to a table, and the report design will drive that.

Comparing output might be performed this way, but Crystal will not append to a table, only write to a new one, so there's another limitation in that idea.

QA is generally done manually for reporting, and comparing test and live (presumably you mean production?) usually nets different results as production is more current.

Since you're a dba, it might be easiest for you to extract the SQL used for the reports (use Database->Show SQL) to validate the rows selected, and then the process usually goes to the end user to sign off on it.

But you certainly could write the data to a database, it just sounds like more effort.

-k

 

[MartinCroft]

The live (production) & test base are (or should be) in sync. The data is from a datawarehouse and is populated in the morning then reporting ran, so they should be the same. I wanted to know if they were using a different crystal enterprise server a compare could be done against all the databases, its a bit over kill as we have compared the source table that crystal gets it data through. crystal uses sql stored procedures, but clients want to test every element. We were looking to see if there was an easy approach rather than capturing all sp output that crystal calls and running the results out to files and comparing file

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
To expand on Synapse's response:
Crystal Enterprise does not store report data in a database..It uses its own database ( the CMS server's database) to handle multiple functions related to authentication, scheduling, etc. - it is independant of and not related to any datasources your reports may be using.





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