Crystal Reports - Gathering data from multiple servers to consolidate to a single report

Crystal can do it but it will probably be a bit slow.  As far as I know you won't be able to change the sources from code since multiple sources is not totally supported.

You can add multiple sources to the report and link them as needed.
A command is probably the best method.  You will need a command for each data source.

Any chance you could use one source and create linked tables in it to the other sources? At least in that way the joining would be on a database server rather than a client workstation.

You could also build the recordset in code and use the PUSH method to give the data to the report.
Here is a link describing the method

http://www.emoreau.com/Entries/Articles/2006/09/Feeding-Crystal-Reports-from-your-application.aspx

mlmcc

What kind of database servers - SQLServer, Oracle ... ? All databases can get SQL from another database or server. You can prepare a stored procedure in one of them , which is going to retrieve and consolidate the data from all the servers in one view and then use Crystal reports against this view. This will be a regular report against one view. There are different waysto handle the consolidation. For example in SQLServer you can create linked servers and directly address the tables

select a,b,c FROM server1.database1.schema1.table1
UNION
select a,b,c FROM server2.database2.schema2.table2

Therare are also other options to get data from different servers. What type of database do you have ?

If you can link to all these servers from tools such as MS Access, or SQL Server you can create a UNION query/view that consolidates the data to a single data set.

Alternatively, at least one of the 3rd-party Crystal Reports desktop schedulers listed at http://kenhamady.com/bookmarks.html allows you to automate the process of:
1. running a report (re-pointing it to a specified server) and exporting via ODBC to a table in a specified database.  That first step would use an option to discard the old data if the target table already exists.
2. Repeating the process with the other servers but now Appending the data to the existing table.
3. Run a different report that uses the consolidated data in the table.

Hi Everyone

Thank you for your replies; it certainly looks possible from what you have all written.  Some additional context would be helpful I think:

The system I am reading data from is closed.  The database is Informix but an old version and the servers were not built to be queried aggressively by remote systems (they're security systems used for opening doors when security access cards are swiped - we're tracking the last time a card was swiped at a given door).  

We have tried historically to perform more complex queries against the servers and the queries time out.  We can't place triggers in the databases as this would invalidate support from the supplier as we would be making unauthorised changes to a closed system.

So whatever I do that's clever needs to be in the report or local to the reporting workstation.  If you have any additional advice or guidance based on this I would be grateful.

Thanks

Hi Vasto

Thank you for your comment - are suggesting a union (via Access) of the tables and then accessing that query via Crystal?  

I fully understand your approach, just wanted to qualify what I think in the (almost) final step.

Thanks

Paul

Yes , Access union will work perform better and will be simpler than Crystal union. Access is not a database fro big amount of data, so if you can replace it with SQLServer or something else will be even better, but Access is a better choice than Crystal to process the data.