Grouping/aggregating data in Crystal Reports

List,  

I just learned something very interesting about Crystal Reports that I thought I'd share with the list. By default, when a Crystal report is designed to do an aggregate operation, for example group by customer and sum the total sales, Crystal will query ALL the data from the database, and then perform the aggregation on the client side. This means in some cases it could pull millions of rows of data across the network only to sum them on the client side and then present the end user with the few resulting aggregated rows. Obviously it would be much more efficient to allow the RDBMS to peform this operation on the server side and then just send the few summarized rows to the client. So, how do you do that? I found the answer in this article from the Crystal/Business Objects Knowledge Base:  

http://technicalsupport.businessobjects.com/KanisaSupportSite/search.do; jsessionid=E50260AE571FFE68CB5EAD35AA95E8B7?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&ext ernalId=c2009635&sliceId=&dialogID=1554409&stateId=1%200%201558047  

In the case I encountered today, this simple change was the difference between the report failing after 12 hours, and completing successfully in 8 minutes.  

Regards,
Brandon

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