I agree with you 100% Tony from the independence makes things 'better' for people who are platform agnostic -- we're talking a 100% UniData solution in all cases, and the issue we're seeing more and more is that prospects want to see that the 'core engine' supports the ability to use BI tools they know and love. The do not want to learn to love what we use now - they want to use CR for their ad hoc BI queries. It's an RFP-deal-breaker more and more in being able to check 'works with Crystal Reports' ... Even if IBM owns Cognos, Crystal Reports is *the* defacto standard in Business Intelligence/ Reporting (sorry IBM). A standard of if OLE-DB (or ODBC) 'works' in my mind is if CR works with it -- it's like the IE browser -- you can carp all day that it's not compliant with the stanrdard -- but honestly -- it SETS the standards. CR is the same way in the BI world.... So you can't really say that OLE-DB 'works' if a major consumer of the provider won't...
That said, before I actually told the client I"m working with that they need to start pushing on IBM for a resolution (that is, a resolution beyond 'Huh! Yeah - I had heard that it didn't work.' <g>) I wanted to ensure it was not something that we had 'missed' in our setup and testing. No one has sung out that a current version of CR is in use using a direct OLE-DB provider connection, which was the main answer we needed to hear. Hey, we make mistakes (hourly if you watch close enough!) so we wanted to ensure that our Crystal testing was an accurate representation of the current state of the UniData art... I do want to say that OLE-DB is working like a CHAMP with DBxtra.Net -- a BI tool we found to see if it was a 'generic' OLE-DB error, or specific to CR. And it's specific to CR. Even so - CR is the 'gold standard' - so we're stuck with it! And, yes - while these kinds of things can be done in any number of ways - we're looking for the 'fewest moving parts for a UniData specific implenetation' and to be able to say that "IBM's UniData has an OLE-DB provider that is CR-Ready"-- I suspect the 3rd party products would increase performance and give other benefits, but that's a whole 'nuther topic... Thanks again! ------- u2-users mailing list u2-users@listserver.u2ug.org To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
