Parallel Crystal | Dynalivery

Parallel Crystal (2.x/3.x) and successor Harmoni (1.x) Product Roadmap

In order to give customers a broad set of choices in technical features and costs, Dynalivery will support two production versions of Parallel Crystal (PCRE), one based on Crystal Reports 7 and one based on Crystal Reports 8.5 (and successors).

PCRE 2.x will be based on Crystal Reports 7.
PCRE 3.x will be based on Crystal Reports 8.5 and successors.

In both cases, Parallel Crystal will act as a CORBA framework or middleware around the commodity CRPE32.DLL and associated run-time libraries. These libraries are available from Crystal Decisions and its worldwide distributors in the packaging of the Crystal Reports Designer editions that include the well-known Crystal Reports Print Engine (CRPE) APIs. They are also available for auction on eBay in used/discounted packages. However we advise customers to be very cautious in making these purchases by auction to insure that they fully and faithfully comply with the Crystal Decisions license terms and to be sure that they obtain the correct libraries.

Dynalivery itself does not package these libraries or resell them.

Dynalivery will not use and retire version numbers 3.0 through 3.5. The first version in the 3.x series will be based on the Dynalivery source code and feature set of PCRE 2.6 and will be similarly labeled 3.6. Dynalivery will commit reasonable commercial efforts to keep the features and version number in sync.

Schedule:

July 2002:
Dynalivery PCRE 3.6 (Crystal Reports 8.5) is largely equivalent to PCRE 2.6 (Crystal Reports 7).

September 2002:
Production release of PCRE 2.7.0. (Crystal Reports 7)

May 2003
Production Release of PCRE 2.7.1/3.7.1:
PCRE 3.7.1 (Crystal Reports 9) will be largely equivalent to PCRE 2.7.1 (maintenance release based on Crystal Reports 7)

August 2003:
Production Release of PCRE 2.7.2/3.7.2:
Minor bug Fixes from PCRE 2.7.1/3.7.1 plus upgrade of the TAO C++ ORB in the Dynalivery CORBA server framework from version 1.1 to 1.2. This change will make PCRE fully compatible with Java clients running under Sun JRE 1.4, IBM JRE 1.3, and IBM JRE 1.4.

October 2003:
Dynalivery's version 1 Harmoni CORBA framework will support multiple engine types and the concatenation of their output on single or load balanced document/report servers. The supported engine types will be Crystal Reports 7, Crystal Reports 9, Microsoft Word 11, and probably one XSLT engine.

Questions and Answers:

Why two production versions?
Especially in the current difficult world economy, many of our customers are very sensitive to price. Crystal Decisions significantly raised its prices for the Crystal Reports run-time libraries between the releases of Crystal Reports 7 and Crystal Reports 8.x. To the best of our knowledge, the Crystal Decisions run-time libraries for Crystal Reports 8.5 or 9 alone carry extra fees of up to USD 26,000 per CPU.

For Crystal Reports 7, the fees are effectively the cost of one copy of the Crystal Reports Designer (about USD 300) per server, regardless of the number of CPUs.

What are the best price/performance alternatives for PCRE 3.x users?
To the extent that Dynalivery customers choose Crystal Reports 8.5 or 9, the best economic alternatives appear to be in server farms of many, inexpensive 1-CPU or 2-CPUs machines rather than fewer, expensive 4-CPU and 8-CPU machines. This potential savings is due to the fact that hardware manufacturers produce the smaller machines in much greater volume and therefore lower cost/CPU. They also introduce faster CPUs to the market on smaller machines first. We understand that the current Crystal Decisions license fee structure does not carry any supplemental run-time charges for up to five (5) concurrent reports and therefore favors smaller servers.

However, there is a counter-argument for easier systems administration for report server boxes with larger number of CPUs.

Do Dynalivery customers also need to buy Crystal Enterprise?
No. Dynalivery customers do not need to purchase any other frameworks around the Crystal Reports run-time libraries (such as Crystal Info or Crystal Enterprise) as a prerequisite for running Parallel Crystal. Dynalivery customers may optionally use Parallel Crystal in combination with a standards-based web/portal server such as BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, Macromedia JRun, SilverStream, JBoss, or Microsoft Active Server Pages. These web/portal servers (not Parallel Crystal) may indeed compete with Crystal Info or Crystal Enterprise in the areas of security, job scheduling, or database access control.

Do Dynalivery customers need Crystal Reports 8.5 or 9 for PDF output?
No. Parallel Crystal has offered high quality PDF output since the days of Crystal Reports 6 in 1999 with its own "Mango" library. Furthermore, Parallel Crystal 2.7/3.7 adds the Saffron Document Server, an all-Java server for generating high quality PDF as well as HTML, RTF, and SVG output. In other words, customers who prefer to stick with Crystal Reports 7 may realize high quality output by using Parallel Crystal.

Do Dynalivery customers need to buy Crystal Reports 8.5 Developer Edition or Crystal Reports 9 Advanced Edition?
To the extent that Dynalivery customers choose Parallel Crystal 3.x and Crystal Reports 8.5 or 9, the answer is absolutely yes. Note that the Standard and Professional Editions of Crystal Reports 8.5 and 9 DO NOT include the full set of the required CRPE32.DLL and associated run-time libraries that Parallel Crystal 3.x requires. Dynalivery customers may also need to buy special run-time or "Expansion Pack" licenses from Crystal Decisions. Finally, Dynalivery suggests that customers carefully review their Crystal Decisions license(s) with their organization's legal counsel and consider negotiating the addition of a simple appendix to the license(s) which states: "Crystal Decisions acknowledges and consents to <customer> using the CRPE32.dll and associated runtime libraries with Parallel Crystal of Dynalivery Corp. of St. Louis, Missouri, USA."

How does the performance of Parallel Crystal 2.x (Crystal Reports 7) compare to Parallel Crystal 3.x (Crystal Reports 8.5 or 9)?
About the same.

To test the approximate capacity of Parallel Crystal 3.6, we conducted some benchmark tests on a dedicated report server costing about USD 3000 (under April 2002 pricing.) The report server had dual 1 GHz Intel Pentium III processors with 512 Megabytes of RAM. The report job requests were submitted to the report server over a 100 megabit per second Ethernet network from a commodity uniprocessor PC with 256 Megabytes of RAM. It ran Dynalivery's Java client (middle-tier) library and J2EE sample code under JDK/JRE 1.3 and the Open Source JBoss web/portal server.

To find the absolute capacity limit for this caliber of machine, we first ran the 8.5 page box.rpt report with saved data 1000 times with a throttle of 5 concurrent, medium priority reports to produce 1000 copies of box.pdf. Under these ideal conditions, Parallel Crystal ran at a rate of 70,000 PDF pages per hour. Saved data means that the necessary data is read in advance and embedded in the report template (.rpt) file. The processors were pegged to close to 100% CPU utilization during the test.

Under more realistic conditions, this capacity figure should be reduced by 50% to 95% to account for latencies due to acquiring data from databases, over networks, and through several translation layers.

For example, the Multi-table DOR report, which reads its data into a Java cache on the middle tier, when run under the above conditions generates PDF at the rate of 27,000 pages per hour.

Parallel Crystal versions 2.7 and 3.7 will offer the Priority Manager as an additional option for controlling response time.

Please use care in extrapolating these numbers to real-world projects by performing extensive testing within your own computing environment.

What advantages does Crystal Reports 8.5 or 9 offer to Dynalivery customers?
Key advantages include: Windows 2000 certification, upgraded database drivers, bug fixes in multi-line text fields, and reading of JPEG images.

How long does Dynalivery plan to offer support for Crystal Reports 7 in its PCRE 2.x series and in the upcoming Harmoni 1.x successor to Parallel Crystal?
As long as customers require it.

What key features is Dynalivery itself looking for in future versions of Crystal Reports?
Support for true 64-bit processing on Intel Itanium and Microsoft Windows, which would offer a material performance improvement over Crystal Reports versions 5-9, all of which are based on 32-bit Microsoft technology.

How does Parallel Crystal compare in performance to high-end report server products such as Actuate?
We hear this question often. Actuate questions (1, 2, 3, 4) the scalability and developer productivity of Crystal Reports in its "Hit the Wall" ad campaigns and positions itself as a replacement to Crystal Reports.

Dynalivery has not conducted an objective benchmark comparing the products.

However, we have a number of customers who use Parallel Crystal to produce enterprise reports in the range of 10,000 to 100,000 PDF pages per day who chose Dynalivery over Actuate. Interestingly, a number of these customers had significant prior investments in Actuate products and skills before doing business with Dynalivery.

In combination with our developer-oriented tech support services, we believe that Parallel Crystal fills a high price/performance niche not adequately served by any of the other leading business intelligence software suppliers.

Are products like Actuate and Crystal Enterprise truly compatible with J2EE (Java2 Enterprise Edition) application servers like BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and others?
In our opinion, they are not truly compatible in architecture, although they may be stretched to make a workable Java interface.

Both Actuate and Crystal Enterprise (formerly Crystal Info) pre-date J2EE. Out of necessity, their vendors built security and scheduling into them. Yet today, they still market security and scheduling as key features. However, from the perspective of a customer today, doesn’t it make more sense to invest in the neutral security and scheduling of J2EE that are the same for all applications, rather than in proprietary security and scheduling that differ across each and every application?

For example, Crystal Enterprise contains components called the Automated Process Scheduler (APS) and the Web Component Server (WCS). Taken together, they are effectively a proprietary web applications server that competes with J2EE. Customers who standardize on products like BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere and who later buy Crystal Enterprise are effectively paying twice for security and scheduling.

Perhaps for some customers there are positive specialty features for end-user computing or administration that make this tradeoff worthwhile?

At least in the case of developers building highly custom web applications with Crystal Reports, Dynalivery’s Parallel Crystal offers a well-supported, and economical alternative that leaves security and scheduling in the capable hands of the J2EE experts at BEA, IBM, and others.

Is XML + XSLT becoming a viable alternative to Crystal Reports and Actuate?
Yes.

Dynalivery engineers are achieving good results in converting complex report templates such as box.rpt into XSL and generating SVG, PDF, RTF, HTML, and other documents. They are using both XMLSPY and JEdit editors to write the XSL with good productivity.

However, we needed to add two proprietary tags for charts and images. Our preliminary benchmarks indicate that XSLT and Saffron will match the performance of PCRE 3.7.1 and Crystal Reports 9 on Windows 2000.

The interest of our customers in XML+XSLT as an alternative database reporting solution has grown dramatically the last year due to the increased but uncertain price of Crystal Reports run-time licenses. In addition, customers are increasingly interested in representing “style” or “formatting” in open text XML rather than proprietary formats such as the .rpt template of Crystal Reports. (1, 2, 3) Open text XML implies that customers will have many economic choices for editing templates, both at design-time and run-time.

One of the key obstacles to the widespread adoption of XML + XSLT to web reporting is the availability of graphical editor(s) of report templates (similar to the Crystal Reports Designer) that would emit XSL but be sufficiently easy to use for a business analyst (as opposed to a highly technical Java or .net developer). One potential solution is the InfoPath editor in the upcoming Microsoft Office 11. Please refer to the following screenshot and article from the March 31, 2003 issue of InfoWorld.

We have prepared a downloadable, 13 minute Camtasia screencam movie that shows the step-by-step process of manually creating an XSL stylesheet roughly equivalent to the early Crystal Reports sample Box Office (box.rpt). It uses Saffron, JEdit, and an upcoming Dynalivery plug-in for print preview of the XML+XSL transformation with JEdit. The movie may be viewed on Microsoft Windows PCs with high resolution monitors supporting at least 1024 by 768 pixels, although higher resolutions are preferable.

To obtain the movie, click here (33MB executable). The movie does not offer training in XSL but is intended to give current Crystal Reports developers a taste of what it would be like to work in XSL.