Home > BI thoughts, Tech tips > Crystal Reports XI and Open Text BI 8.5.1 pros and cons

Crystal Reports XI and Open Text BI 8.5.1 pros and cons

I’ll revise this post regularly based on my findings and experience.

Items in this list may only show my inability to perform a specific action with one solution, which at least means that there is a usability issue with it 🙂

Crystal Reports XI:

  • + Formula Editor
  • – No permanent data model: a new data model needs to be recreated each time I create a new report
  • – No ability to work on results and combine them together
  • No ability to aggregate on the server: I didn’t find for instance how to create the following statement: With the help of Paul’s comment, I was able to find how this works in Crystal: you need to turn the “Perfrom Grouping on Server”  option for both the report AND the general option. [cc lang=”sql”]select count(my_field) from my_table[/cc]

Open Text BI 8.5.1:

  • – Doesn’t support multiple outer joins with SQL ODBC connection
  • – Can’t report on a table named “users”  with SQL ODBC
  • + Can work with results and create complex “super queries”
Categories: BI thoughts, Tech tips Tags:
  1. admin
    April 27th, 2009 at 09:31 | #1

    You’re right: I had to turn that option on both the “file\option\database\advanced options AND on the Report Options to force Crystal send a ‘count(xxx)’ to the database 🙂

  2. Paul Segal
    April 27th, 2009 at 02:08 | #2

    In older versions of Crystal there is an option (used to be under file|options|Database|Advanced Options, but I don’t know if its still there or not in XI), which was labelled Perform Grouping on Server. This will force the aggregations to happen on the RDBMS and not pull it all down and aggregate locally.

    For an existing report, it was under File|Reporting Options.

  1. No trackbacks yet.