One of my readers who uses Clarion as a development platform has been struggling with an upgrade to CR 2008 for several weeks.  He was upgrading from v8.5 to CR 2008 (v12) and we found that some reports that would run fine in CR 8.5 would not run in CR 2008.  We narrowed it down to reports that had more than 2 tables so I figured it was a problem with the SQL syntax and sure enough, v8.5 uses a different syntax for these reports.  We tried downloading the latest TPS ODBC driver and it didn’t help.

So I contacted a colleague who has uses the same platform and he found the same thing happens in both XI and CR 2008.  And yesterday we received confirmation from the folks at SoftVelocity that there is an incompatibility with later versions of Crystal caused by a change in the way CR chooses the flavor of SQL.

So if you are using Clarion / Topspeed / TPS from Softvelocity you might want to hold of on a CR upgrade until this problem is resolved.  I will let you know as soon as I get an update.

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9/20/2009:

I have a workaround solution from the folks at SoftVelocity who were unaware of the problem. It has fixed the problem for the two users who were experiencing it:

Start ==> Run ==> RegEdit then perform the steps as provided below.

* [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Business Objects\Suite 12.0\CrystalReports\Database

* Highlighted “Database” and “right mouse click.” Select New then Key. Name the key, QueryBuilder

* Highlight the QueryBuilder key and “right mouse click.” Select New then Key. Name the key, JoinBuilder

* Within the JoinBuilder key (on the right side of the screen, and below the “Default” entry, “right mouse click.” Select New then String Value. Make its name, StarEqualJoinBuilder

* Highlight the StarEqualJoinBuilder, “RightMouseClick” and press Modify, then make the value: c4otsx,c4otrx

*Close your RegEdit

So thanks to the folks at SoftVelocity and also to Mike Gorman of Whitemarsh Information Systems Corp who went out of his way to help confirm both the problem and the solution.

There still may be a problem if you try to mix Left Outer  and Inner Joins in one report, we are still checking on that one.