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Third Party Database Report Products Smell Bad

Third party report packages like Crystal or Safari or whatever are just a pain. Carefully review why you want to use them before you get the product in. The report product is usually installed badly by rip and run consultants, complex to use, and an endless headache to administer.

Pointy headed managers will spend their time moving columns from one side of the page to the other and recreating the old legacy system reports instead of learning the capabilities, tools and business model of the real ERP package such as Baan or SAP. And the rest of the employees will follow the leaders. As a result the reports are usually badly written queries that suck down every resource on the OLTP systems affected. These products are just an interface to the database and may or may not need additional security as they may bypass the OLTP application rules that control access to the data. The administration and set up of these tools is a lot of work when done properly.

For real datawarehouse type reports or data mining get something else that uses a data warehouse or do something that does not destroy the OLTP system. For OLTP reports, you could use the ERP tool you just spent several million bucks on and a year implementing. Or use SQL in the manner I described in my reporting for OLTP systems article: OLTP Reports

I have seen Safari, Crystal and other products; they are a good way to support lame consultants. My advice is fire anyone that insists on any report packages without showing how it makes huge wads of cash for your company. Because that is what it costs to implement properly.