05 October 2009

Crystal Reports 2008 V1 and MySQL

I have had the worst time with Crystal and MySQL. I tried MySQL's ODBC 5.1 drivers, but for me it didn't show any tables or views, even though I had all CR 2008 updates applied. Then I tried MySQL's ODBC 3.51 drivers, which showed tables, but when I didn't select any database, it would not show all databases... it would just show Add Command as the only option. That's not very useful since I have multiple databases. I'd have to create a connection for each one.



I finally ended up finding this page, and using the JDBC drivers. They aren't perfect, and they are a pain to install (editing config files), but they seem to work better than ODBC. I suppose Crystal just hates MySQL... which is ironic since that's the database they embed in their server product!



Getting Crystal Server 2008 setup... now that's a whole different (and painful) ball of wax. If I had this to do over again, I think I would have evaluated Crystal alongside a solution from Logi first. From the hassle I've had just to get a Crystal Reports Server 2008 solution working (and still not successful so far), I can only imagine it being better with Logi.