December 26, 2002 at 5:17 pm
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Does anyone know what tool / software would be the best for generating Reports from SQL 2000/7 Databases. I have use Crystal reports but it's really clunky and not very user friendly. Anyone use anything else that might work better and more easily? I have heard about active reports but don't know
December 26, 2002 at 9:06 pm
We're moving to mostly HTML, most reports we do arent that complex. We've used Crystal some but dealing with the ocx or java install have been an annoyance when getting extranet users set up. Lockwood Tech has a reporting tool you might look at for asp or asp.net - not in same class as CR, but perhaps worth investigating. Saw the ad, have not yet tried it. Probably others. Depending on your needs and how you'll generate them the Access report writer isn't bad and the cost is decent.
Andy
December 26, 2002 at 9:12 pm
The three most widely used tools of reporting from what I've seen, have been Crystal reports (Most widely functional and since version 8.1, getting decent but still a programmer's tool), Microsoft Access (Prior to version 2002 or XP, this was terrible, and created many issues, but since XP uses more atomic connections and releases the locks much better. Also integrates ADP which is nice.), and Excell (pretty much the same as access, but a more analytic approach, and charting, let's not forget charting....LMAO).
Each has its own audience, supporters, and issues. I have seen a variety of others, but these seem to be the standard ones.
December 27, 2002 at 9:54 am
Crystal sucks. Haven't used it in about 18 months, but for 10 years I've hated it.
Excel is ok, if it's text report, try to send Excel sheets since I can easily generate these in DTS and email them on a regular basis. Let users use a familiar interface to muck with data.
Active Reports is fantastic. Basically lets you build a VB Form and do all the things you can do on a form to build a report. We used it for on-the-fly web stuff that we saved as pdf to download. Same process that Accuate uses, though much lower end. Accuate is 10s of $1Ks for CPU, but works great. I recommend this if you need to meet a specific format. Probably some other products as well, just don't know them.
I tend to build HTML report from hand using ActiveX tasks in DTS and populating them for DBA stuff, checking jobs, backups, etc.
Steve Jones
December 31, 2002 at 5:42 am
I'm a little prejudiced as a reseller, but Cognos has two tools that report well off of SQL Server. One is an OLAP tool called PowerPlay. The other, called Impromptu, is similar to Crystal Reports and generates well-formatted (pretty) reports with a point-and-click interface. Many of my clients have switched from Crystal Reports to Impromptu just because it's much easier to use, although I'm sure that Crystal can also produce good reports.
I use both Cognos tools as the front end to data warehouses.
Don
Edited by - landrake on 12/31/2002 05:51:51 AM
Donhttp://www.biadvantage.com
December 31, 2002 at 5:54 am
Alright Steve I agree Crystal sucks but if done properly can be quite usefull but I suggest find someone who works with it all the time (sorry I don't volunteer but I can give you hints if you need) to make it work and use SPs and preformulate as much as possible in the query befoe Crystal touches or it can cause a good deal of overhead to the connection (all tools suffer here). I prefer building myself in ASP but have a tool in developement that I have not nor probably will ever finish unless I find more time to myself (got an XBOX guess it won't happen now). We haven't looked yet at Active reports but I do have them on my list of folks to try.
Boils done to this, if you want pretty it will be a headache as you will have ActiveX or JAVA bits to deal with.
If you want functional try to remove the need for extrememly pretty tools and do ASP.
If you want best performance use SPs and be clean and concise in your quries, none of this adhoc crap with lots of optional items.
If you want least headache go ASP or use one of the ASP tools out there and avoid anything that must download and run on the client.
December 31, 2002 at 9:00 am
We prefer Active Reports to Crystal, though there are some things (straight text reports, believe it or not) Crystal handles better.
Crystal's APIs can be cludgey. Also, there is a potential security risk since Crystal is capable of saving the data with the report.
K. Brian Kelley
http://www.truthsolutions.com/
Author: Start to Finish Guide to SQL Server Performance Monitoring
http://www.netimpress.com/shop/product.asp?ProductID=NI-SQL1
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
December 31, 2002 at 9:13 am
Is Active Reports the software produced by Data Dynamics? If so, it looks like something worth checking out.
Don
Don
Donhttp://www.biadvantage.com
December 31, 2002 at 10:46 am
Yes. Also check out their DynamiCube and ActiveCube if you do any OLAP.
K. Brian Kelley
http://www.truthsolutions.com/
Author: Start to Finish Guide to SQL Server Performance Monitoring
http://www.netimpress.com/shop/product.asp?ProductID=NI-SQL1
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
January 2, 2003 at 7:00 am
I`ve been using Crystal for 6 years in various roles and havn`t had any problems with it. I`m slightly biased as I worked for the company that produces it, however, in various lab situations I`ve seen it up against ALL the competitors, Brio, BO, Actuate, Cognos, Active Reports etc, and for complete functionality, ease of use, performance, deployment etc it beats them hands down. Hence the reason why it is the most deployed and popular reporting package in existence.
and No, I don`t work for them anymore......
and Crystal clunky?!? What the?? It`s easy! I learned v4 in less than a day!
January 2, 2003 at 7:17 am
I am a programmer turned DBA. In the past I have worked with Crystal Reports and Active Reports (vicariously through a college). We have been successful with both approaches but developing simple to moderately complex reports takes way too much time in either tool. (Also, the Crystal web engine is the least reliable software I have worked with professionally. Most of my reports are deployed through web sites, so Crystal's solution is not acceptable to me.)
I don't like development interfaces, or report generators, to get in my way so I have found, like many others, that the most reliable and quickest approach is to build HTML reports usign ASP. I used to take the standard approach and loop through an ADO recordset creating HTML, but have recently moved to retrieving my data in XML while using an XSL stylesheet to format the data into HTML for me. This has proven to be much faster. With SQL 2000's XML support this is a great way to generate reports.
Adam Goss
DBA
Adam Goss
DBA
January 2, 2003 at 9:27 am
I have also had great success using SQL2000 XML support with xsl to generate HTML. We have replaced all of the old crystal stuff and maintenance is a dream compared to the crystal monster. Also you can develop some generic stylesheets for the simple reports, and then writing the report turns into creating a stored proc and inserting a few rows in some tables. If you have a more complex report, you can still do anything you want with the same XML output.
January 2, 2003 at 9:49 am
permit me to troll my own product ASPReport.
see http://www.lockwoodtech.com/index.asp?PageId=Art_asp_report_retail&TitleID=products
You can check out the demo for upcoming version 3.0 (which should be released next week) on the site which includes a pretty cool new graphing component.
A few years back I was stuck in this same situation. I had a database and needed to develop a bunch of reports. I checked out crystal but just decided to bang out the tabular HTML reports myself in ASP. But each report was different, params no params, long/short etc and I got bogged down. So I experimented with stored procedure METADATA to create a front end that would handle ALL reports, interrogate params, create filters etc.
Check out the freeware section of sqlservercentral - I've been trying to discontinue it but the Freeware version of ASPReport should still be up. It isn't great but gets the job done.
The retail version offers a lot more in terms of customization, features (export to excel, graphing etc). Currently it is $399 with full source. Next version should be ASPReport.NET
If nothing else - lemme know your feedback and we can improve the product.
Brian Lockwood
LockwoodTech Software
Brian Lockwood
President
ApexSQL - SQL Developer Essentials
January 2, 2003 at 5:18 pm
Hi
I have used or reviewed the following for both OLAP and RDBMS reporting from SQL and Analysis Services. Price differs, different tool for different needs:
- Cognos Impropmptu and PowerPlay
- MIS Reporting Products
- ProClarity Analytics Platform (OLAP only)
Andrew Keenan
Andrew Keenan
Consultant, Business Intelligence
Technology Services
KAZ
E andrew.keenan@kaz-group.com
January 3, 2003 at 3:24 am
I have used Crystal Reports via VB to do reporting and once u get used to interface found it easy (just boring having to create and postion fields). Also have used Cognos for DataMarts but mostly produce reports in Excel via stored procedures, works well for my users as they have the data to manipulate as they want.
Agree that crystal can have security issues with data saved with report but I always save the report without data and use Active Data and supply recordsets at run time.
Far away is close at hand in the images of elsewhere.
Anon.
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