Performance and Implementation Considerations

There are certain factors that an organization should take into account before implementing Business Views. Because many people will likely use each Business View, care should be taken when building the query to ensure that performance meets expectations. Additionally, because of the increased functionality (such as joining two data sources), you might be tempted to simply create a structure that fulfills business requirements but sacrifices performance. Although most of the performance considerations are exactly the same as those for Crystal Reports design, some of the most common pitfalls are considered in the following sections.

Joining Large Data Sets

It is recommended to keep disparate data source joins to a minimum for large data sets to keep performance satisfactory. Because Crystal Enterprise must, based on the Business View, link the data on the Crystal Enterprise server, both data sets must be transferred to that system before they can be joined. Further, joining large data sets can tax the memory resources of the Crystal Enterprise server.

CAUTION

With the use of disparate data sources, Business Views do not allow the Crystal Report option of grouping on the server. To concatenate the disparate data sets, most of the processing is performed within Crystal Enterprise and not the database.

To ameliorate performance concerns, users or administrators can schedule reports at off-peak hours and cached into the system; the user is not waiting for the report at view time. Another solution might be to combine the disparate data sources into one data source.

For more information on scheduling, see Chapter 23, "Using Crystal Enterprise with Web Desktop," and Chapter 27, "Administering and Configuring Crystal Enterprise."

Business Objects Universe

Prior to its acquisition of Crystal Decisions, Business Objects provided Business View functionality in the form of Universes. Business Objects has released a roadmap with migration information that indicates that Business Objects Universes and Crystal Business Views will be merged at some future point. Contact Business Objects for more information.

Versioning

The Crystal Repository does not provide version control. Although there are alternatives to achieving versioning, the user cannot simply revert to a prior version, for instance.

Using Other Metadata

Other applications generate metadata layers; for example, ETL tools have their own metadata layers. One advantage is to be able to use this metadata so that the number of metadata layers is kept to a minimum. Currently Business Views do not support using other metadata layers or the importing of these layers. Please contact Business Objects for more information.