Looking for a Reporting Solution and Need Advice - reporting-services

The company I work for is looking for a reporting solution with the following requirements:
Must be able to generate a set of reports nightly.
Must give the client the ability to create reports dynamically.
Must have robust export features.
Must have a viewer that can be displayed within a web application.
The company is looking at utilizing Crystal Reports and/or SSRS. Our company is mainly .NET developers using VS2k8 and SQL Server 2k8.
What are some of your experiences with each product and which one do you think would meet our requirements? It seems both products offer the requirements I mentioned, but they both feel robust in different areas.

If you plan on using .net and sql server why bother with Crystal Reports? It is definately the wrong route to take. Take advantage of Reporting Services as it is very very very easy to use, setup, and deploy.
The web placeholder for hte reports has automatic export to excel, pdf, rtf, html, etc.
It is very robust and a very clean intuitive tool. The use of stored procedures within datasets makes it all the better.
We initially went the CR route and it was nothing but trouble and not as easy to build and deploy simple reports. We moved to RS and it is night and day...

From my own personal experience, SSRS is much simpler to set up and use - it also seems to be the way MS are going. In addition to that, if you're already using MS SQL server, you have no further license costs.
I haven't used the SSRS report builder heavily, but it certainly allows the creation of relatively simple reports by (somewhat skilled) end users.
EDIT: Should note that my personal experience of crystal reports has been akin to repeatedly shooting myself in the foot...

One downside to both Crystal Reports and SSRS is that report-viewer controls have COM dependencies. Moreover, much of the BusinessObjects .Net SDK has COM dependencies. Probably not a big deal if you plan to host the site internally, but worth mentioning.
I had a client whose hosting division wouldn't allow for COM installations on the shared server. Fortunately, I was able to use the BusinessObjects WebServices SDK in combination with BusinessObjects OpenDocument URL SDK to build a custom interface to BusinessObjects Enterprise.
Hope this helps.

Crystal and Reporting Services are both similarly capable tools despite what people say. Each tool can do most of what the other can with each one having particular areas in which it excels.
However, rather than installing Crystal you can try installing Reporting Services and just set fire to piles upon piles of used bank notes - the end result will be the same.

Related

Access 2000 reporting functionality substitute

Here in my job, we use Access 2000 as our only report deployment tool, and as many of you know, Access 2000 has some limitations, like not supporting OOP.
My question is:
What is the better replacement for it, Crystal Reports, Active Reports or SQL Server Reporting Services ? If you guys have any better idea, I would be happy to know it.
I have been searching and finally found the answer. First of all there are a lot of tools capable of this task, examples: Crystal Reports with RAS(Report application server, a crystal reports solution for building dynamic reports) API for .NET; You can do with xml and SSRS, first you generate a xml file with the information and then use the rdlc to display it. You can use Xtrareports a devexpress team solution. You with c# code create and manage your reports. This is it.

(SSRS) SQL Reports Web Service vs Report Viewer vs SQL Report Front End

We are planning to use SQL Reports in our company and we are currently evaluating the ways to expose the reports to end users. Should we use a reporting web service and then render the reports through a .NET Application? Should we use a report viewer or should we expose the SQL GUI to the users? What are the pros and cons of these over each other? Could anyone please help? I couldn't find any information anywhere for this.
The simplest is to use the Report Manager website that is enabled by default with an SSRS installation it's very quick and easy to get running and the security/ snapshot(cache) / subscription (email etc) options are easy to configure on a per site /per folder /per report basis. It's drawbacks are:
It's ugly - although if you are good with CSS it is possible to mess
with it, but I wouldn't. Newer versions e.g. 2008R2 and 2012 are less ugly
It has an ugly URL - although you could use a DNS alias to get
around that
It doesn't let you control how parameter drop-downs and other
objects appear on the page, but that's minor
I usually use Sharepoint (MOSS not WSS) (if the company has that) with the report viewer web-part. It doesn't require any special Sharepoint SSRS integrated mode - you can read about that but it's that's not a path I recommend taking.
The reports then appear to be embedded within the company's existing intranet site which looks professional IMO. Powerview for sharepoint is also a good option (or performance point in older versions of Sharepoint)
I would definitely NOT go down the road of webservice, that would entail a huge amount of unecessary programming. If you have a lot of spare .NET developers around I still wouldn't do that.
Rather to use the report viewer object in Visual Studio to display a report in an .NET web application. Designing reports using the BIDS (2008R2 and earlier) or SSDT (2012) is much easier than programming, particularly if you've used other reporting tools such as crystal reports or even Access. Using that report viewer object is a much better option than rolling your own.
I've written my response in order of easiness and work required. Hope that is helpful.

Concerns with using SSAS as an end user ad hoc reporting solution

I am currently evaluating reporting solutions for use within my organization and one of the requirements of the solution must be 'ad hoc reporting' and is defined as 'given an existing report the user will be permitted to modify the data points of the report and, additionally, save the report for later viewing'.
I worked through a basic report using SSAS and SSRS; this certainly worked but I found it to be a little bit to involved with needing to open report builder, specify the cube that should be used, and so on not to mention that the Report Builder (SSRS2K5) is pretty vanilla. The people that will be looking at these reports are certainly not technical people and my concern is that this process will be completely overwhelming. I did find this component and it is much more user friendly since the data source can be set dynamically at runtime and all the user has to focus on is what data they want to see.
Does SSAS/SSRS offer any other methods for ad hoc reporting other than using Report Builder to connect to cubes and going from there? Does anyone know of, or used, any products similar to Active Analysis that they might recommend? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Excel 2007 and 2010 actually has connection ability to adhoc query and analyze data from an SSAS cube. Excel have a host of features that allows interaction with the cube including using pivot tables and data mining plugins to analyze the data.
simple example here:
http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertutorial/2016/using-excel-and-creating-a-pivot-table-report/
SSRS2012 Power View in Sharepoint mode (soon in Excel) - overview is here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3726.power-view-overview-en-us.aspx
Not quite sure what is meant by "user can modify the data points of the report" but with Excel 2007 / 2010 you can use the What If Analysis feature to modify the data in a pivot table. You can also combine that with Analysis Services writeback feature to enable some pretty cool data modelling functionality.
If you're looking for what I call "exploratory analysis" (i.e. you don't know what you're looking for in the analysis) then a product like our ActiveAnalysis component, PowerPivot, or Tableau are all good tools (note that a key difference being that our ActiveAnalysis is a developer component that you can cheaply embed into applications, and the other two are strictly end user tools).
However, if you have users who want to be able to create an "operational report" or they might want to customize existing reports those are probably not ideal tools. We actually created ActiveReports Server specifically for this type of scenario. It is a drag & drop business-user-friendly ad-hoc reporting tool that sounds like it might be more appropriate for the "not technical people" that it sounds like you're dealing with. It does not depend on SSAS and works all inside of a web browser, so nothing to deploy.
Scott Willeke
Product Manager | ActiveReports Server
GrapeCity

Report Builder 3.0 Limitations

I am building an application and the client is asking for reports. Normally we would create the reports for them using reporting services. We are wanting to give the client report builder and let them build there own reports. Some of these reports can be complex and I am not 100% sure how far report builder will take us.
Before we decide if it’s worth giving the client report builder. What are the limitations of report builder? What type of report is it no good for?
I found it is fine for creating and managing reports to be placed on the report server. You obviously cannot use it for .rdlc reports. For most standard users and power users it will be just fine and do what they need, and will not require the entire VS IDE shell that comes with SQL Server (BIDS).
Just remember, if the client is asking to manage their own reports, it's kind of an "all or nothing" situation. You cannot limit their access to the data. Make sure they have a read only reporting account set up on the server. Any reports you create for them originally are backed up.
Train up time may vary depending on the technical level of the end-user expected to use the tool.

Compare SQL Server Reporting Services to Crystal Reports [closed]

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Which of Crystal Reports and SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) is better to use?
On the one-hand, Crystal Reports is a steaming pile of expensive and overhyped donkey poo, and on the other hand SSRS actually fulfils all the promises that CR marketing makes - and it's free.
My contempt for CR stems from many years of being obliged to use the horrible thing. There's really no point in detailing the utter odiousness of CR when I can give you references like Clubbing the Crystal Dodo or Crystal Reports Sucks Donkey Dork (not as funny but rather more literate and substantiated with technical details).
Free?! Yup. You don't even have to buy MS SQL Server to get it - you can install SQL Express with Advanced Services. This is available as a download that includes SQL Server Reporting Services. While SQL Express is limited in the number of concurrent users it can support, the following observations are salient:
The licence for SSRS obtained as
part of SQL Express only requires
that it be deployed as part of SQL
Express. There is nothing forbidding
connection to other data sources or
requiring that a report obtain data
from SQL Server.
The abovementioned version of SSRS
has no intrinsic restrictions on
user connections. All limitations
are imposed on the SQL Express
database engine.
SSRS uses ADO.NET, which includes,
out of the box, drivers for Oracle,
Jet (Access), OLEDB and ODBC
Thus you can connect the free version of SSRS to any back-end to which you can connect ADO.NET, which includes (for example) MySQL. I am told by Rory in a comment below that this is "not supported". That's true but I can't find anything in the licence that forbids it and while the drivers are not supplied by SSExpress they certainly are supplied by most versions of Visual Studio and you can ship them in your setup kit. This may not be an expressly supported configuration but so what? Even if you did have a full MSSQL licence it would be asking a bit much to expect Microsoft to help you talk to some third party database (not to mention a bit weird).
I use SSRS extensively at work both for inward facing reports and for outward facing reports embedded in ASP.NET applications that provide bureau services to large numbers of paying customers. In our case it happens that the backing store is a licensed copy of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, but this is incidental to the technical merits of our reporting solution.
There is a long list of capabilities that Crystal Reports claims to support but which either don't work or which require a staggeringly expensive licence if you want more than five users. You can't even trust CR to do SQL correctly. SELECT COUNT(*) FROM SOMETABLE WHERE 1=0 should produce a result of zero but it it produces one. The built-in query engine is defective, and a team that screws up something a bunch of amateurs can do for free (eg MySQL) has no hope of getting anything you'd describe as performance out of their code.
And they don't. The evil thing leaks memory like a bucket with no bottom, and if you use SQL profiling tools you will find it is spectacularly inefficient.
As for the alleged support, I can personally attest that dialog resize bugs have gone uncorrected for decades after they were first publicly documented. If you get out your credit card and pay the extortionate ransoms demanded (I too would want handsome pay to support such a horror) you will find yourself talking to someone who claims his name is David, but inexplicably pronounces it "Dah-feet", and who doesn't even understand your question, much less have an answer.
The SSRS support situation is fairly similar, but it actually works so you don't really need much.
SSRS, on the other hand, does everything that CR claims to. It is not without bugs, but they are delightfully few, and they seldom survive more than one release cycle.
The SSRS designer UI is hosted within the Visual Studio IDE. It is attractively presented in typical Microsoft style, but more than this it is quite well thought out, incorporating several simple but fundamental departures from traditional report designers. For example, to present tabular data you define a table rather than fiddling about with individual text boxes. As a result you don't have to screw around trying to line them up, and putting borders on them is a trivial stylesheet exercise.
SSRS actually does all the things CR claims to, it's inexpensive, there is extensive reliable technical documentation, it's designed to be extended (also documented) and you can connect it to anything for which you can get an ODBC driver. This is a no brainer.
Some shortcomings of SSRS
It is not obvious how to bind fields in page headers and footers.
It is not possible (so far as I know) to position relative to the bottom of a page. This is a genuine problem for certain types of report, and one for which I can think of no workaround.
There's no support for expando horizontal rollups in cross-tabulations.
There's no direct support for report headers and footers. Use Rectangle objects at top and bottom of the report layout, with pagebreaking properties set appropriately. Or use subreports. The people who complain about this obviously haven't tried very hard.
Lack of support for overlapping group intervals (the CR grouping system can do this) UPDATE SSRS 2008 R2 now supports this. It's buried in the grouping edit dialog. Look up "group variables" and read this.
It actually looks like overlapping groups can be done with SSRS2005 too, although I never knew that. I wonder did anyone ever crack the bottom-relative positioning issue?
I've been using Crystal report till version 10 and was always doing stuff i wanted successfully along with ASP.NET applications. Its output on web is really good like WYSIWYG and exports to Excel and PDF are also accurate. Printing is also marvellously correct.
Recently, i've been working on SSRS 2005 for around an year and have been living to witness so many lackings that must have been provided out-of-the-box too. SSRS web output varies greatly with different browsers and diff resolutions and would easily make a developer sick. Moreover, the scrolling issues with report viewer would make an end-user mad quite early as it is based on HTML using an IFRAME. (Note: Crystal 13 uses an IFRAME in the web-viewer which suffers from sporadic text-wrapping and overlapping issues). The exports are not good at all. You cannot align images left or center in cells and cannot specify background colors for images. You cannot center align complete report body. For possibility, i've played with the rendered HTML for hours and figured out exact replacements to make that works, but these simple fixes were not known to SSRS developers i guess because probably, they never used SSRS for themselves.
Further, in web applications, you need to bear the bad UI for parameters out-of-the-box. I have simply removed it completely and the cost of creating it in ASPX pages made me think to design tabular reports in DataGrids instead using ObjectDataSource and database pagination technique. You cannot layout the parameters to your needs. Bugs in paramters sections postsback complete reports without any changes. Paging with grouping works with a trick, but than sorting fails on complete dataset. For every bit of medium to advanced level of UI requirement, SSRS costs so much of time figuring out that it is simply not possible. As there are less of SSRS users, online community has no good solutions for simple problems. Not to forget the good side of SSRS is its deployment, notifications built-in, caching and configuration side, but no UI to win.
BOTTOMLINE is that i've seen SSRS frustating you just due to the nonresponsiveness of Microsoft Support team when they have to say 'sorry! not now' after a month. SSRS 2008 also doesn't have many of these issues fixed rightaway. Moreover, moving to SSRS' 08 means a complete migration of back-end platforms as well. Keeping the equation in mind that the more you use a software, the more it gets mature over time, Crystal is anyways a much better choice because, SSRS soon accumulates costs for fixing their bugs by yourselve.
You can deploy an app using Reporting Services by including 3 DLL files. That's a huge benefit. (Note--you have to get one of the 3 DLL files from the GAC.)
With Crystal Reports, you have to install the runtime on each machine that will run the application (either a website or client app).
Reporting Services has all of the features most people need, and the deployment is MUCH easier. I will never user Crystal Reports unless I have to.
Since this thread has popped back open, I'll add my two cents. I had to use Crystal for about three years during the version 7 and 8 days. I hated every minute of it. I've seen a little bit of the newer versions and still don't like it.
I dislike it so much that it pains me to say this: from my experience Crystal's better suited than SSRS for complex reports. A coworker and I tried desperately to get a moderately complex report layout to work in SSRS and gave up. My impression of the product -- just my opinion, mind you -- is that it's not quite ready for prime time.
Crystal will make you hate your life and look for another job, but there's a reason it's so pervasive: it works.
Reporting Services is much better in my experience. It is a better environment, but best of all the connections (data sources) are separate from the report and can be shared. This makes for much simpler deployment between environments.
I've used both, I'll add a couple of points to what's already been said:
For simple stuff, I'd recommend SSRS by default. Crystal is a bit bloated and quirky.
Crystal can easily export to MS Word format (.doc). Customers want this pretty often in my experience.
If formatting is important, Crystal may be better. For example, SSRS reports can't have more than one type of text in a single text box. Meaning that you can't have, say, a comment at the top of the report that has both italics and normal text. Crystal can do this:
Note: This report contains data from start date to end date inclusive of those dates.
SRSS can't (without multiple overlapping textboxes). I once had a 20 page word document given to me, to be converted to a report with data for the dozen or so graphs and tables in it. I started out in SSRS, but realised that in Crystal I could just copy and paste the hardcoded bits of the report straight from word, with coloured headings and all, and saved days of work. So Crystal does have a better "designer" in many respects.
Update:
Apparently both of these issues have been fixed in the current SRSS. Anyone care to comment further on this?
I agree with #Carlton partly for the reasons he describes. I also think that reporting services is a more mature product (even though Crystal Reports has been around longer). The Test and deploy model is pretty hearty, and the built-in ability to track report usage is very helpful.
I also find it much easier to design reports in Reporting Services - Microsoft has learned how to build a good IDE, whereas the Crystal IDE has always seemed like an after thought (though that's better than an afterbirth, which is what it used to be).
Edit: Additional thoughts
I also think that in a Windows shop, SSRS offers all kinds of sweet integrations with the OS and SQL Server. You can rely on SQL assemblies for built-in code reuse fairly easily in SSRS, and the integration with the Active Directory security model makes securing your reports very easy.
Man...my company has sooo many crystal reports...and the company before that had lots too. From version 8.5 to 11.5. They kind of already have their foot in the door so to speak. I think the CrystalReportViewer is a steaming piece of crap but it does work(for the most part).
After reading some of these answers, I'm switching to SSRS for my next reporting project! The writing is on the wall...MS will drop Crystal from VS and replace with SSRS. The only thing that's going to suck is when MS starts charging for it.
EDIT: Messing around with SSRS today and it looks quite promising. I must say the designer is taking some getting used to...CR Designer has it beat in ease of use. You can tell this is designed for programmers where as CR is geared toward report designers.
EDIT2: SSRS really fails to meet my reporting needs. Designing reports sucks when you want to preview and no parameter prompting available for standalone. Is there a better way to design them...preferably not in VS?
Did you think about an alternative? If you want to use the features of Crystal Reports but don't want to pay so much for it you could have a look at Crystal-Clear which is an Java based reporting tool supporting Crystal Reports templates too. It comes with a GUI-designer and data sources are also configurable per system. (Almost ODBC-like, you just set a name for the connection and the connection is configured on the system.)
I wonder why no-one mentioned one big issue with CR - that it just fails in source control or team environment. Correct me if I am wrong but I really looked very hard for any report diff tools. There's one (released about year ago) but it just doesn't do well - not because it's bad but (I guess) because CR just don't expose report structure correctly or something... I tried to export .rpt to XML but it's clunky and wrong. I even tried to write my own .rpt comparer.
It's not about team development only; even if there's single developer it's a nightmare to maintain reports versions, and if your customer decided to add few things or to change few colors, you're now cursed to track every single textbox since there's absolutely no way to find out the changes.
RDL format is much more clean and open. And this can be a pretty major advantage.
I have used both for years.
Crystal reports charges way too much and I try to use SSRS whenever possible.
However, SSRS does not support firefox or any other browser, only IE, this is a problem.
The reports in Crystal look nicer and the exports are more powerful, users want good exporting to Word.
If you are a java programmer, I would use Jasper Reports, it is free and uses Java language for functions.
I've used both (Crystal Reports 2008 and SSRS 2008) because I did not notice this thread in time.
Apart from the setup which was a bit easier with CR, I could not notice a single feature where CR is at least on par with SSRS. Yes, Crystal Reports is really that bad.
In my opinion the absoultely worst part in CR is the IDE. But there are also other killer features, such as poor SQL performance and horribly looking graphs (at least in the CR version that comes with VS 2008) are also notable "killer" features.
I have worked with both CR and SSRS and this what i found.
Crystal Reports runs in its own memory while SSRS runs in the limited SQL Server memory.
Crystal report is way too expensive. Recently they have slashed their price to 250$ i think as a response to SSRS 2008 release.
SSRS is free.
The biggest reason why Crystal report thrives :
You can design 80% of reports in a project using SSRS. But for the remaining 20% you have to use some other reporting tool. These 20% reports are used by none other than top level managers , directors & CEO. Their requirement can never be undermined and CR does a wonderfull job there.
Crystal report is still COM based. which is a pain in the a**.
Crystal report is not lacking capabilities or features. It is the work horse of SAP. But lot of its classes are protected and dont provide access to programmers. This is by intention. The SAP people are so greedy they want to keep every feature under control and charge extra fortune for exposing the claases and objects to the developers under special license arrangement. Just debug and quick watch the ReportDocument object in VS you will know inspite of everything available in the object you can hardly use them in your code !!
As far as GUI & CSS issues are concerned expecting a COM object which is designed for precision printing , to render correctly in every browser is a moot point as even a simple div renders differently in different browsers.
I have been working with Crystal reports since 7 years and cursing it all the time while actively exploring all other alternatives. But i am yet to come across something as flexible as Cystal Report. For bulk of the work SSRS is good. But for Dashboards , Complex Reports with subreports, Balance sheets, trial balances i shall never waste my time in SSRS.
Just try a Google Trend search on Crystal Report. It has been steadily declining since last 6 years. surely the future does not look good for CR.
But Hey ! MS, SAP and ORACLE still endorse Crystal Report at the core of their applications !! and no BI product comes cheap.
I feel like a martian having an extensive and positive (but sometimes complex) experience with Crystal Reports, which is now completely integrated in our user interface (VBA), where requested reports parameters and filters are transparently inherited from the user interface ...
If you're considering SSRS and are concerned about the fact that it's "free" but you need to either buy and additional SQL Server license or distribute SQL Express, then you might be interested in Data Dynamics Reports
It offers all that is in SSRS and adds Master Reports, Themes, Calendar data region, Data Visualization (Databar, Sparkline, Iconset, ColorScale, ...), complete object model for maximum programming flexibility, royalty free end user report designer, barcode report item, excel template export and data merging, and much more. You can download a trial from Data Dynamics (now GrapeCity) and try it with few reports, you will not be disappointed.
I've worked with both now and have seen them side by side. Crystal has been good, but expensice over the years. Its clunky, but we've gron accustomed to it and familiar with the interface. I don't work in the LAMP environment, This house works with MS Dynamics and MAS with some pretty large clients.
I love not having to worry about the client install for SSRS. Distributions is far easier and sharing data sources and report models is working out well.
AS far as broweser go, I've seen perfectly rendered SSRS 2008 gauges in Firefox. I have exported those gauges to Excel without issue. I have deployed reports with and without MOSS to phones. The ability to use windows authentication to deploy reports as well as hide them is fantastic. The report viewer object in VS 2005 and later is sweet.
People, please refer to version of which you are talking about!
For example, the VS2008 built-in free RDLC reporting (the same as SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services) doesn't support binding fields in header and footer, and it is a basic feature!
Now I'm converting a huge report from this VS2008 Reporting / RDLC 2005 to Crystal Report 2008 Basic (which comes with VS2008) because it doesn't have this basic feature.
I am confident that Reporting Services 2.0 / RDLC 2008 (which comes with Visual Studio 2010) and better yet, the newest Reporting Services 3.0 / RDLC 2010 (which comes for FREE in SQL Server 2008 R2 Express With Advanced Services) are better SSRS solutions.
SQL Server R2 Express with Advanced Services (FREE)
http://www.microsoft.com/express/Database/InstallOptions.aspx
Right now I am making a Proof of Concept for Reporting Services 3.0 / RDLC 2010, and will post the results.
Reporting Services (SSRS/RDLC) is always more easy to work, but easy comes with a price. For simple reports, always choose SSRS/RDLC. For complex reports with master-detail, page control and so on, please make a PoC of these scenarios with newest SSRS/RDLC versions (2008,2010) and also with Crystal Reports.
For those who are comparing the old Crystal Reports XI and Reporting Service 1.0 please see this 2005 post:
SQL Server Reporting Services and Crystal Reports: A Competitive Analysis
http://www.crystalreportsbook.com/SSRSandCR_Conclusion.asp