In my prior job I was know for my willingness to create very advanced
TSQL queries. I have written queries exceeding 10,000 characters
in length without any WHERE clause. I know this because we stored
the queries in a database table which had a VARCHAR(8000) column, and I
had to change it to be TEXT. The same query had CASE statements
embedded three deep and derived tables embedded three deep, but it was
because I need to flatted data in ways the data structure never was
intended to.
Now I'm writing simple financial reports (Income Statements, Trial
Balances, etc.) and, due to the fact we're using Data Dynamics' Active
Reports, I essentially have to format the data at the query
level. This has led to more CASE statements than I've written in
my entire career, and I've only been working on these reports for 3
lousy days!
I am fully blaming this on Active Reports and not the data structure,
so I will dedicate another posting to a critical comparison between AR
and Crystal.
posted @ Tuesday, January 25, 2005 9:40 PM