Reporting Tool Options

[karajanfan]

Does anyone know if there has been a technical comparison
between the various RDBMS reporting tools that are available? I am especially interested in the differences between Oracle Reports and Crystal Reports (advantages, disadvantages), but also any other major reporting systems that are available.

Thanks.

 

[nagornyi]

For several years I've been actively working with both Oracle Reports and Crystal Reports and always try to compare the tools. I didn't see any paper comparing these tools and would be interested to read such a paper myself. However, here is what I think about these tools.
1. As far as report developer tool, CR and OR are about equal, with slight more power in OR.
2. CR is easily working with any DB, while OR is primarily for Oracle DB.
3. Major Difference: CR is solely report development tool, while OR is application development tool. OR can leverage all power of PL/SQL and Java to do whatever we need with the DB. While in CR it's difficult to do any manipulations on DB side. Let's take a simple example. A report is printing invoices. You printed today invoices numbers 1 to 200, and tomorrow you want the report to pick from number 201 and continue printing. CR is extremely lame on task like this. To write someting back to the DB, a report front end is needed. For OR, to write something back to the DB is a trivial task.
4. Major Difference: CR is much muck easier to learn and use - if even OR is used only as report development tool. CR is robust, always working, and it is easy to get results quickly. OR on the contrary is very capricious, complains a lot on something being wrong with the report design, and often it is not immidiately clear what is wrong.
5. Major Similarity: neiter of the tools is object oriented, like, say, Actuate. So if you have for example 100 reports and on each you have label: "Report run on:...", and later they need to change the label to "Report executed on:...", you have go to each report and manually change the label.

 

[nagornyi]

I new I would have to continue this tread as issues come up in the memory. OK, Oracle Reports can not export to Excel. There are add-on tools out there, but nothing compared to simplicity Crystal Reports does this.

 

[sem]

Oracle Reports can generate both html and xml, thus its results may be imported by Excel (not too old versions)

Regards, Dima

http://seminihin.narod.ru

 

[nagornyi]

There is a bunch of ways Oracle Reports can be exported to Excel, though none of them is close in simplcity an easiness to doing it in Crystal Reports. Excel export is a recognized drawback of Oracle Reports.

 

[sem]

The idea was that this may be done without " add-on tools", I'm fully agree with unobviousness of all that ways.


Regards, Dima

http://seminihin.narod.ru

 

[LionVan]

There is a wonderful add-on tool named rep2excel that can enchance oracle report server to output report in excel format.

For more information, please visite

http://www.lv2000.com/

Van