Full disclosure: this blog post is based on a presentation I gave when I was invited to the Mastering Business Objects 2009 conference in Sydney. I suppose they could have some sort of intellectual property claim on this information, but A) it isn't proprietary, B) the demo during the presentation blew up -- they tastefully referred to this phenomenon as "gremlins", which is much more polite than saying "ill-prepared foreign speaker just pooped the bed" -- and I wasn't invited back, and C) the conference team is awesome, really vested in the community, and probably have no interest in flying me back down there to do anything about it. So we'll go on, IP concerns notwithstanding.
Assuming you've read the marketing materials, you know that Crystal Reports is very, very good at one thing: crunching lots of numbers from a relational database and displaying that information in a "pixel-perfect" format. The marketing materials stress that because that is how you justify the purchase, and those same marketing guys (who probably owe me a drink, or, even better, a slot in a golf tournament) really just need that purchase justified. But you need more that that, don't you. You need to stretch your IT dollars and wring as much value out of every purchase as you can. I'm here to give you a few tips on how you can get a lot more out of your meager Crystal investment by poking around the Available Data Sources area, and you won't even have to enter me in a golf tournament to do it (although I'll happily play, I'm admittedly terrible).
Think about the possibilities of taking "non-traditional" data (that most people don't normally think about as data at all) and combining it with "traditional" data sources (any relational database you'd like) into a beautifully-formatted, presentation-ready report you'd be proud to put your name on. Can you think of a scenario where that would be useful?
No? Probably my fault for not setting that up better -- don't blame yourself. Let me give you a scenario: your boss wants a report that will show each regional manager their sales, some dimensional data that only exists in Excel, a count of how many customer service emails they got in the last month, and how much space they are taking up on your SAN, and they want it all without writing a single piece of ETL. Why they want all that seems a bit odd, but you couldn't even come up with a scenario, so deal with it. Just for fun, we'll even throw in what people are saying about your store on twitter. Which is #awesome! Now let's look at some possible data sources.
Data Source | Pros | Cons | Best Practices |
Excel Spreadsheets |
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Universe Queries |
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File System |
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Web Services |
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Outlook |
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Just wanted to take a quick minute to say that here are two basic options when it comes to combining data, and, as almost always, have some thoughts on both.
I don't really have a ton more to say about that, except that if you are going to run this report a lot, I'd go with Option 2 whenever possible.
Crystal Reports, when used carefully, can provide a polished presentation layer for non-traditional data sources. With a little savvy and attention to detail, report viewers will see a clean, professional presentation, and you will have squeezed a little more value out of a sunk cost. And I think we all know that extra value + no extra investment + bells & whistles are what get you promoted.
And maybe even free entry into a golf tournament.
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