What is your reporting tool of choice? [closed]

Answer 1

Cognos with an Oracle backend is what we use. We also use spotfire for visualization on top of cognos.

Answer 2

This isn't so much a positive suggestion, but more of a cautionary tale against crystal reports... As with other people, getting the right version of the crystal runtime is important, but having done that, I still had this problem:

1. Spent weeks developing reports that had embedded images.
2. Tested on dev and staging environment, all A-OK.
3. Deploy to live server - doesn't work... Hmmm...

Spent two weeks trawling forums and looking for advice, eventually got a response from a crystal body on their forums. Suggested that he had seen a similar problem to do with MS Paint being set up as the default application for a certain file extension.

At this point, we gave up trying (after I convinced my boss that this wasn't a take the piss answer, but actually a formal response from Crystal). Handily we were migrating to new servers about a month later (where the reports worked), but honestly, wouldn't touch them again...

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Oh, and have used SSRS and found it to be pretty good for most things (particularly the most recent version).

Answer 3

Cognos is a robust suite of tools (we use it as a front-end for an Oracle back-end), but there's a pronounced lack of documentation on how to accomplish complex reporting tasks -- mostly, you end up banging on it until you get something to work.

I wouldn't discount the usefulness of using Microsoft Access as a reporting front-end. It doesn't have that useful Web-enabled functionality, but for in-house reports it's very versatile and surprisingly powerful.

Answer 4

We use Crystal Reports where I work. It has quite a few limitations, and we find ourselves doing almost all of the logic in Database procedures and Views.

One limitation to note is that Crystal Reports does not allow multiple layered sub-reports. In other words, you cannot have a sub-report inside a sub-report.

Answer 5

We use i-net Clear Reports for our reporting (seeing as how we "eat our own dog food"). ;)

• It is like Crystal Reports,
• can read Crystal Reports templates,
• the API is more useful,
• costs less than Crystal Reports (and if you factor in support costs, costs less than open source)
• is platform independent because written in Java.
• we offer a free and fully functional report designer

Answer 6

I don't really have much SSAS work to do but I've been quite taken with this:

Cube Browser for ASP.net

It offers many of the capabilities of an excel pivot table in a web app, (thought I'm not enough of an expert on Excel to really know the whole of the pivot table's capabilities - it at least looks comparable to visual studio's cube browser).

Unfortunately the demos don't seem to be online anymore :(