Chapter 6: Linking Tables

Overview

In Chapter 1 you learned how Crystal Reports works, often using databases as the reporting data source. In your reporting work, you'll probably find yourself using databases 99 percent of the time to create reports. Because of the frequency of which you'll use databases for reports, it's beneficial to explore databases in greater detail.

Most databases that you'll encounter are relational databases. Relational databases are modeled so that repetitive database information is separated into multiple tables. The reasons for this are to improve database efficiency and ease database maintenance.

Up to this point, you've created reports based on just one data-base table. However, most of the time, your reports will require two (and possibly more) database tables. In this chapter, we learn why most databases use multiple tables. We also discuss how to successfully link multiple tables for your reporting needs.