Crystal Analysis

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Crystal Analysis (a.k.a Crystal Analysis Professional) is an On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) application for analysing business data. Originally developed by Seagate Software.

It was first released under the name Seagate Analysis as a free application written in Java released in 1999. After disappointing application performance, a decision was made to rewrite using ATL COM in C++. The initial rewrite only supported Microsoft Analysis Services, but support for other vendors soon followed, with Holos cubes in version 8.5, Essbase, IBM DB2 and SAP BW following in later releases. Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is conspicuous by its absence, although it is expected not to be ignored in future versions. The web client was rewritten using an XSLT abstraction layer for the version 9.0 release, with better standards compliance to support Mozilla based browsers -- this work also set the building blocks for support for Safari.

Crystal Analysis relies on Crystal Enterprise for distribution of analytical applications created with it. The product's web front end was so innovative that many people do not believe that it is a zero deployment client, requiring no software to be installed on the client other than a standard web browser. It broke technological boundaries, being the first commercial application that used partial page refreshes by using client side remote procedure calls from Dynamic HTML.

[edit] Release timeline

Seagate Analysis 1999, by Seagate Software
Crystal Analysis Professional v8.0, 29 May 2001 [1] by Crystal Decisions
Crystal Analysis Professional v8.1, Q4 2001 by Crystal Decisions
Crystal Analysis Professional v8.5 9 July 2002 [2], by Crystal Decisions
Crystal Analysis Professional v9.0 9 April 2003 [3], by Crystal Decisions
Crystal Analysis Professional v10.0 8 January 2004 [4], by Business Objects
Crystal Analysis Professional v11.0 31 January 2005, by Business Objects
Crystal Analysis Professional v11.0 Release 2 30 November 2005 [5], by Business Objects