Is crystal reports dead?

Question

We have a developer with Crystal Reports experience, and some new reports that need to be written for a WinForm application accessing data from a SQL Server in the network.

An external consultant has made the comment that "Crystal Reports is dead" and to forget about it and install SQL Reporting Services instead.

Is this a reasonable proposition? Is the learning curve required for the developer to get the job done going to provide some significant improvement to the report generation process over Crystal?

Answer 1

Is this good advice?

Is SSRS worth the learning curve in terms of a payoff from the change?

Well worth it, on several levels.

1. It's cheaper to deploy in terms of licensing.
2. It's much more robust. Your developers will stop resisting change for fear of breaking something.
3. It's a lot faster (subject to the efficiency of the backing SQL)
4. Your developers will be happier. CR wages are high for the same reason sewage workers are well paid.
5. It's extensible. Doing this requires a higher level of expertise but it gives you a lot of options.

Items 1-4 directly affect the cost of ownership. CR is a bottomless pit of maintenance costs.

As to the learning curve,

• The general principles of operation are the same
• SSRS is simpler to understand because it is more internally consistent
• Developer reactions are polarised into "Urgh, it's different" and "Thank god for that"

Why did the consultant make a sweeping, emotionally charged statement like that?

Your consultant went over the top for a very good reason.

CR is unreliable, expensive and difficult to use. Simple bugs have gone uncorrected for decades after being publicly documented. Telephone support is expensive and in my experience worthless. Different versions are incompatible to the point of breaking each other. The internal query engine produces incorrect results.

If it isn't dead then it should be. I will cheerfully swing the hammer if your consultant holds the stake. Afterwards we should cut off the head and stuff the mouth with garlic because otherwise some imbecile in management will read a glossy brochure and inflict it on us again.

Managers are like children: the idea is too complex for them. If your consultant gave a comprehensive and considered assessment, the only thing they would remember is that he talked a lot about CR. This would lead to inappropriate decision making, so he simplified it to sneering, which is something they can understand and remember.

Two upvotes and two downvotes. Very telling. Political correctness is not useful. Lie to others if it helps, but never lie to yourself.

Crystal Reports has a very high cost of ownership, both capital and ongoing, but discussions of a topic like this rapidly degenerate into religious wars, and people lose sight of the facts.

• The people who buy it aren't the people who have to use it.
• The marketing material is marketing material which is as close to lies as the law permits.
• A detailed consideration is lengthy and technical, well beyond both the capability of decision makers.
• Faced with decisions they can't handle, bureaucrats in business and government alike use a standard blame evasion tactic: they do what everyone else did, no matter how stupid.