01-24-2008, 09:08 AM
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#9 (permalink)
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| Crystal Reports Guru Join Date: May 2006 Location: Philadelphia, PA
Posts: 1,182
Rep Power: 4 
| The advantages are speed, flexibility, speed, power, and speed. - I once did a test of consecutive years of giving using SQL. I got the results for our entire database (250,000+ constituents) in about 27 seconds.
- I just finished an export of 250,000 records with about 50 fields per record including summaries for all giving and giving for each of the last five fiscal years. It took 7 minutes. My colleague used RE Export to export information on 2,550 records and it took almost 7 hours. That's 60 times longer for 1% of the number of records.
- I can create views and report off the views.
- I can always use fiscal years instead of just the times that BB thinks that I should be able to use them.
- I can compare two fields.
- I can create joins on any expression rather being limited to {field1} = {field2}. This is particularly important when creating outer joins.
I could go on, but I need to get back to work.
Drew
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J. Drew Allen
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Crystal Reports and SQL Server Consultant
It is better to live your destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. |