Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer Edition

Structured Query Language (SQL), the standard means of specifying what information you want to extract from a relational database, was designed by programmers for programmers. In order to extract values from tables with straight SQL, you have to formulate convoluted statements from field names and cryptic keywords--which doesn't usually leave time available for making business decisions. The makers of Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer Edition understand that writing SQL statements isn't everyone's favorite thing to do, so Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer Edition provides tools that make it easier to extract meaningful information--in the form of charts, tables, and calculated values--from the contents of database management systems like Oracle, Sybase, and Microsoft SQL Server. The developers of Crystal Reports also knew that some people love to manipulate data at a low level with SQL and other programmers' tools, so the package contains goodies for them, as well.

As is often the case with enterprise solutions, this product consists of two separate applications. The core package, Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer, is for accessing the contents of database tables and generating reports based on their contents. Wizards make this process extremely easy. You just specify the database you want to operate on, which can be local or accessible via an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) link. Having done that, you can choose the tables and fields you want to extract values from. The wizards make it easy to specify which fields should serve as headers, and simplify the process of doing calculations on extracted values. In a report on the monthly sales of a multinational chain of stores, for example, you could group individual stores' sales figures by country, and calculate total sales figures for each country and for the chain as a whole. Wizards also handle formatting, so it's pretty easy to get neat-looking reports customized with your organizational logo. Wizards aren't limited to tabular reports: you can use them to generate reports that reveal details in response to clicks (so-called drill-down reports) and personalized form letters for mass mailings.

Going beyond the wizards, Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer offers a tool for visually creating joins among tables (by which you can consolidate the fields in multiple tables into a single report). It also makes it relatively easy to build SQL queries, mostly by exchanging syntax memorization in favor of a logically organized set of expandable trees from which you choose the commands you want. With SQL queries, you can do things like find the maximum value in a field across many records, or perform complicated text-searches on the contents of text fields. Managers and others who have been taught to revere database queries as a black art known only to database administrators will be delighted by the ease with which they can create reports to support their business decisions.

The other product in this package is Crystal Enterprise 8, which is capable of taking report documents from Crystal Reports and distilling them into publications that it then serves to network users. There are several ways to go about preparing reports for network publication, the simplest being nearly automatic conversion of Crystal Reports documents into Dynamic HTML (DHTML) files that standard Web browsers can read. With a little more work, Crystal Enterprise will serve reports in streaming form--meaning they're updated dynamically as their underlying data changes. It'll also generate Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files, as well as reports delimited by Extensible Markup Language (XML) tags. The XML feature is especially cool, because it means you can use Crystal Enterprise as an engine for generating business documents (such as invoices and purchase orders) that are fed to business partners via an XML-based information-exchange system, such as Microsoft BizTalk Server.

Because it's easy to use and flexible in its output, Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer Edition belongs in the toolkit of anyone who's responsible for sharing complicated information--especially numerical information--with others via a network. --David Wall

Crystal Reports allows you to deliver rich, interactive content from virtually any data source, publish it to the Web, and integrate it within applications. It includes the following features: report viewers (including DHTML, ActiveX, and Java), a Web-based report-management system, Web server with licensing for five concurrent users, a customizable Web desktop, and report delivery regardless of location or platform.

There are also report types (subreports, conditional, summary, cross-tabs, form, drill down, OLAP, top N, multiple details, mailing labels), hyperlinks, charting, mapping, parameters, alerts, add-ins for Excel and Access, sorting, running totals, grouping, top N, bottom N, image format support, formula editor, experts, and more. The program also provides drivers and support for more than 30 SQL-, ODBC-, OLE DB-, and PC-based data sources, including XML.