Where on the scale is the best balance?

1. Do everything in views / stored procedures? Perform all grouping on server?

OR

2. Do everything by joining tables, creating formulae and aggregating in Crystal?


I'd say always 1. as long as you have constant connection but a slow one, as the aggregation will get the network activity lessened.

Crystal does things SQL CAN'T DO - eg. cross-tabs, and makes the result nicer than a load of courier font listing. Good to save data with it and make it portable.

I have a fully functional Dashboard Report with 12 Gauges on it. Boss is asking me to rewrite it with a stored procedure behind it, where it WAS just a view with 10 columns into the report, many formulae producing between 3 to 15 needles per gauge... This is a lovely way for me to develop. Is it too demanding to do it this way? The server has been crashing.

Should the level at which you develop be kept an eye on?

I doubt if your server crashing has anything to do with your report's current design because you are already using views to pull the data. On the client side, you are using Crystal to calculate formulas for each gauge, but this doesn't have any effect on the server. If you were doing filtering in the report, then yes you could decrease server load by performing it on the server side. But I don't see that happening and thus you server will still crash.