August 30, 2006 at 2:12 pm
My organization is considering switching from Crystal Report to SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. I'm looking for some feedback of your experiences with making this transition.
I personally have been using Crystal Reports since version 7.0 and currently use XI. I have some reservations about the SQL 2005 Report Designer in its ability to deliver the same flexibility as compared to Crystal.
I'm looking for feedback from those that have a solid background with Crystal Reports. Here are some of the features our reports require and/or questions I have:
Any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated, even if it doesn't address the features above. Tips or things to avoid upon transitioning would also help.
Thanks.
August 31, 2006 at 8:21 am
While I cannot speak directly to Report Services as a reporting tool, I can speak to dropping Crystal Reports from my reporting tools. I had found Crystal Reports to be very buggy especially when developing custom built client-server apps using SQL Server database and VB.
We opted to migrate away from Crystal Reports to Excel and realized the following benefits:
1. Saved the licensing costs from Crystal Reports. Excel was a sunk cost already.
2. We pushed more of the report "heavy lifting" onto SQL Server through the use of parameterized stored procedures.
3. Excel is a more stable software package that is better documented than Crystal Reports.
4. End users are confortable using Excel. Less training when set up right.
Now...What is my take on Reporting Services? I am evaluating Reporting Services as we plan for our eventual upgrade from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005.
August 31, 2006 at 8:39 am
Hmmm... I wasn't going to post here because I don't know a fat lot really, but I have played with reporting services a fair bit.
My first impression was that it isn't any better than Crystal.
I kind of left it there really, what with Crystal being a complete pain in the rear end. My main problem with it was with accessing data sources through VBA - I never managed to hook into the reporting engine with much success, so my report viewer always had huge dll and security issues.
Ok, so my main problem is report distribution - report server is an ABSOLUTE DREAM for distributing reports. Love it, love it, love it.
The report designer itself is clunky and I don't like it very much, particularly the web client bit, there is restricted functionality compared to developing in the Studio environment. There are some paradigms it takes a while to get your head round (reporting models mainly).
I never went very far into the type of stuff Crystal does, frankly I don't like Crystal programming, it is far too messy and it never seems to do anything you can't do in a stored procedure anyway. Good luck reverse engineering your existing Crystal reports.
It does export to Excel nicely though.
Other than that, can't tell you much. Why not just have a play with it?
August 31, 2006 at 8:44 am
When I started my new job a little over a year ago, my very first assignment was to convert close to 30 enterprise-wide reports from Crystal to RS. At that time, I had only a little experience with Crystal, and none with RS (although I did know my way around SQL Server reasonably well).
My experience with RS has generally been very positive. RS requires a structured and logical approach to report development (something I found lacking in Crystal). Binding data sources (at least SQL Server-based ones) to reports is easy. So is report formatting. Subreports presented no problem, either. My biggest complaint, at least with RS v1, was the lack of easy support for dynamic data sources, and the Notepad-like (another word would be "cheesy") editor for writing VB code-behind. RS v2 has addressed the first issue well, the second not at all. But I get over the editor limitation by writing code in Visual Studio or Macromedia Homesite, and just copy-and-paste it into RS.
Hope this helps. You won't be disappointed.
August 31, 2006 at 11:33 pm
Hi
I have worked with Crystal Reports / Crystal Enterprise extensively and my personal option it that any type of Crystal Report can be created in Reporting Services. Yes there are differences but you would expect this.
One of the concerned we had was with Reporting Services was scalablity of the server components but if you are not running thousands of reports I do not think this will be a problem at all.
An area where I found reporting services much better was the dundas charting components is far better than what crystal has on offer.
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