Progress & Crystal Reports

[leonbutler]

This is perhaps the biggest long shot in the history of shots.....but....

Does anyone know of anyway in which the performance of Crystal Reports against a Progress 9.1c database can be improved?

At the moment it is painfully slow (50-500 records a second) and I need to come up with a better solution. Ideally native support is the way forward but Crystal Decisions aren't, by the looks of things, going to do this in the near future. Is ODBC the only way I can connect? Would OLE DB be any better?

Has anybody ever tried exporting an entire Progress DB to another DB provider? (I'm guessing this is near impossible if not suicide - but at the moment I'm considering everything )

Leon

 

[HelloMike]

Back in the distant past I seem to remember querying the database with Progress 4gl, outputting data to a text file and getting Crystal to read the text file. Another option would be to have a dummy "reporting" table in your db, and collect data from there. Either way, you get to use properly structured 4gl queries rather than the SQL that Crystal uses.

HTH,

Mike.

 

[leonbutler]

Thanks for the reply....

Having searched the net for ideas, I am warming to the idea of using another database to report from.

I have heard that it is possible to replicate a Progress DB in SQL Server. How would one begin to contemplate this? Such a replication would need to be done in real-time - i.e. the database writes to two locations at a given time. Any ideas?

Leon

 

[BSitko]

I have done this with some success. We connect to Progress with Merant's ODBC drivers. I have it update some tables from Progress into SQL once an hour. Usually takes 20-30 seconds to run it. I use this to run many web apps which rely on our data stored in Progress. It works quite well. I just wish it was feasible to have it real time but the ODBC drivers for Progress just aren't quick enough to make it feasible.

 

[mork571]

Just wanted to chime in and agree with BSitko. We're also using the Merant ODBC driver.

We have no complaints about the performance of our crystal reports.

 

[drlex]

I'll also add to the fray; we use Progress 9.1d, Openlink ODBC 5.1 and Cognos. For some reporting, the speed is vastly (factor of 10) improved by using a copy of tables held in SQL server.
(I'll confess that some of the speed improvement is due to the SQL server tables having an index suited for OLAP rather than trading)
lex
PS is there any advantage in uprating the machine on which Crystal runs? By sticking cognos on a dedicated server, we also enjoyed a 4x speed boost on the processing time.

 

[DrBean]

We're running Progress 9.1d using ODBC Merant SQL92 drivers on a Win2K Sever with 4GB RAM, and CR8.5 is fast. The downside of CR, for me, is joins and the limited set of SQL instructions. I use Crystal SQL Designer to create intermediate query tables.