A few days ago I started Crystal Reports and it seemed to take a very long time to open up.   The first thing I did was to reboot to see if I had something hanging around in memory that needed to be cleared out, but that didn’t help.  Then I timed the startup and it took roughly 8 minutes to get to the start page, with the menu unresponsive in the meantime.

So I did some Google searches to see if this was a common problem.  What I found was a forum thread that said to turn off  “check for updates on startup” (in the “help” menu).  Sure enough, when I took that off the problem went away. What is odd is that I haven’t changed this setting recently so I am not sure what caused the change in behavior this week.   What is also odd is that the post was from last fall, so this is a problem that apparently comes and goes.  I wonder if it is a server issue at SAP?

A customer of mine received an Email from SAP telling him that:

“… many of our customers have requested assistance on verifying that their license
quantities of our products are correct.”

It then instructed him to go to a  “license confirmation site” and submit a license confirmation before a specified date.  When you go to that site Continue Reading »
“Do It Yourself” License Audit from SAP

Universal Time (also known as UTC/Unix time/Posix time) is a DateTime value that stores the number of seconds since 1/1/1970 at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England.  The values for 2009 are around 1.2 billion. One of my readers did some work to convert these values into normal DateTime values and wanted to work on adjusting for her local time zones, as well as adjusting for Daylight Saving Time.   She contributed some logic and I polished it up a bit and Continue Reading »
Converting from Universal Time (UTC)

This week I had 4 different customers ask about the same problem – duplicate records in a report.  After explaining the process I use to troubleshoot this for the fourth time I decided it might make a good BLOG article.

1) The first thing I do is check the joins to see if one of them is obviously wrong or only partially complete.  A partial join is a join that needs 2 or more fields linked, but where only some of the needed links were made.  Continue Reading »
Dealing with duplicate records or “table inflation”