Does dBaseIV Native Driver work in Crystal Enterprise?

[tconway]

Crystal Decisions is not sure if the dBase IV driver will work with Crystal Enterprise. Does anyone know? The real problem is very slow reporting and we are trying to speed things up. Native is always faster.

Also, any other tips on how to speed up the web reporting. They've told us that CE is going to perform about 50% slower than report designer. I have downloaded the white papers on speed tips. It is really the CE I am interested in speeding up.

Thanks

Tim

 

[synapsevampire]

I just tried one and it worked.

-k

http://www.informeddatadecisions.com

kai@informeddatadecisions.com

 

[tconway]

We had the original CE 8.0 Disk (the freebee they were using to 'seed' the market a year or so ago. After about 6 downloads and installs of patches etc., dBaseIV did work. Original error was 'driver not supported.'

Only problem is, the speed is still pathetic even with native drivers. If fact timing it, no change at all.

Guess we'll just have to do our best at streamlining the reporting load.

thanks

T

 

[synapsevampire]

Make sure that your dbase tables are appropriately indexed if you're doing any joins.

I wonder what you consider to be real slow reporting... Crystal isn't blazingly fast, but it should outrun just about any printer around, and if you have very large tables, dBase IV is a curious choice for the database.
If you like xbase code, at least consider Fox 2.5 or 2.6, whatever the equivalent to DB IV was, it's about 10 times as fast.

-k

http://www.informeddatadecisions.com

kai@informeddatadecisions.com

 

[tconway]

We're using Goldmine. It's Dbase IV.

Slow reporting would not be much of an issue if it was really just a "report" we were running. Our clients need to retrieve a complex dataset burried deep in the bowels of relational data, often while they're on the phone, or even just in need of some information while they are working on something else, but they want it reduced to a push button, dressy (an SQL grid just won't do) You know what its like. They never want something easy. A 3 page report off a database of 10,000 records that takes 1 min 23 seconds to run while your on the phone will always get plenty of complaints, and eventually they won't use it.

And your right, crystal never was blazingly fast. We've had reports in Business Works 12 that you would hope would be finished the next morning.

I've been tried everything to speed it up. Things like Reporting off an ADO data definition works good or exporting just a handful of records to an Access table. But what a hassle to get it all setup. I just was hoping to find some 'new' tips for CE which I am not really very familiar with.

Thanks though for your help

T

 

[synapsevampire]

Sounds like you need to set up a data mart, though I wouldn't use Access.

Consider SQL Server with a nightly job to populate tables (star schema). That will provide very fast querying, and scale very nicely.

Sounds trickier than it is.

-k

http://www.informeddatadecisions.com

kai@informeddatadecisions.com

 

[tconway]

Sounds like a plan

Thanks

T