Special Edition Using® Crystal Reports® 10

Connecting to COM-based Data Sources

Crystal Reports provides direct access, or native, drivers for some databases. These drivers are written specifically for a particular database and are often the best choice. However, because hundreds of types of databases exist, Crystal Decisions can't possibly write direct access drivers for all of them. So often, users turn to using standard data access layers such as ODBC or OLEDB to connect to their databases. Often, the vendor of a database provides an ODBC driver or OLEDB provider so that other applications can access the vendor's database. Sometimes though, even this is not enough. Customers have data that they would like to report off of that is not accessible by any Crystal Reports data source driver ...