Re: Crystal Reports 8.5 with Oracle 9i

Adam Brasic wrote:

> Dan-
> Thanks for the reply- I appreciate it. Yes, I had been using IN
> OUT REF cursors for all the SProcs that were being applied to my
> reports, so I should be all right on that front.
> However, as far as drivers are concerned, I was told by the DB team
> at Crystal (and not just the help desk crew, I'm talking about Tier-2
> personnel) that the native Crystal driver for Oracle connectivity is
> only supposed to work for Oracle up to 8i. My issue is that I was
> able to connect to the DB fine (using the native Oracle driver) for a
> set amount of time (about 2 months), and then after a certain point
> was unable to view all of the Sprocs that were present in the schema
> (i.e. I could see the Sprocs that I had created up to a certain point,
> but the most recently created SProcs would not show up under the list
> of available data sources). In addition, in trying to create a new
> blank report off of the sprocs that had already been succesfully tied
> to a report (i.e. I knew that they worked), I consistenly received an
> ORA-01001 error message. Checking the max cursor limit revealed that
> I was well under the total amount of cursors that could concurrently
> be open.
> By switching to an ODBC driver, I was able to view ALL of the
> stored procedures that were present in the DB; however, I wasn't able
> to actually connect to any of the SProcs, as I received a "Invalid
> string or buffer length" error message.
> So, unless I'm doing something else grievously wrong, I am led to
> believe that the DB team at Crystal isn't too far off the mark. I
> tried an evaluation copy of CR 9.0 and was able to connect to my
> Sprocs with no issue on the very first try.
> Are there any new drivers or hotfixes that I should be aware that I
> shouls apply to my install of CR 8.5? I've already installed SP 2,
> and didn't see any hotfixes relating to any DB connectivity issues
> with Oracle. Any input anyone has on the above is appreciated-
>
>
> Adam

Didn't realize you had an antique version of Oracle. Your problem then is the fact that you are trying to mix a very recent version of one product with an ancient, unsupported, version of another: Never a good idea. ODBC drivers are almost always problematic so I'd suggest leaning on them to upgrade Oracle.

Beweare of Crystal 9. In fact just throw it away. First off you can't deploy reports created with Crystal 9 without spending thousands of dollars on app server software that is an entirely separate purchase ... bet they didn't tell you that ... the other reason is that Crystal 10 will be released in the Spring. I think most people, myself included, who have had experience with Crystal 9 have returned it for a full refund and gone back to 8.5.

-- 
Daniel Morgan
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/oad/oad_crs.asp
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/aoa/aoa_crs.asp
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
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