Crystal Reports vs. SSRS: Multi-view reports

In the world of Business Intelligence, there are two competing forces in the area of reporting: Crystal Reports and SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services). Both are established products and both continue fighting for the same niche, using different strategies. Many other fancy tools exist,  but very can do what they do.

In this entry, I will talk about one important feature that you might want your reporting software to do: creating multiple views of the same data. Who can do it better?

Telling The Story with CTE's

I can divide the history of my knowledge of SQL in two ages, before and after Common Table Expressions (CTE's). I shake my head in disbelief when I think of all the times I could have used CTE's and used subqueries instead. To think that many years ago I was in a conversation and I said "I don't like subqueries" but didn't know there was a better way. I was still new with SQL and I found a subquery like a hole to another dimension. But the skill of SQL seemed to be measured in the ability to manage multiple nested subqueries so I had to learn the hard way. Having the mind of a developer, I am more interested in being able to make sense of what the query is doing based on its readability.