Re: Business Objects Vs Oracle Reports for batch reports

>My main issue is performance; how BO fares with Oracle Reports. I heard BO
>does the joins on the client side;

That is not completely true.

Be aware that many Crystal Reports (CR) programmers are woefully deficient in their SQL skills. They use the query generators built into the product with no understanding of how the query works. Their mindset is "do it in CR", so they will do all processing in CR because that is what they know. Much of the advice you will get from the CR forums (www.Tek-Tips.com has several excellent ones) is biased by this ignorance of how to approach the problem from the sql side of things.

It is possible to build a query by hand and put it into CR. The query can be pretty sophisticated. UI support for this capability is rather sad - it's harder to do than it needs to be and not very sophisticated about changes to the underlying query. If you go this route, do as much formatting as possible in the query to minimize rework in the layout editor.

CR is far superior to Oracle Reports (OR) when it comes to building a simple report easily. It's much easier to do easy things in CR.

OR has much more capability. It's much easier to do hard things in OR. Poor to average-skilled programmers don't tend to like it, because it takes a data-centric view of building a report, and CR takes a printed page view of the task. I consider OR to be a much more versatile product. In addition, the way CR handles allowable parameter values is simply laughable - except to the poor sods who have to maintain the addition of 1 new code value to 200 reports that all use that parameter.

But - unless you really need the extra power that OR gives you, the training investment in CR probably outweighs the extra capability. Training most programmers is expensive.

Hope that helps.

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