Refers to version 2008 of Crystal Reports (v12.*), a business-intelligence application used to design and generate reports. Crystal Reports came integrated with Visual Studio versions up to 2008.
Provides user with a very user friendly environment to design WYSIWYG reports. Crystal supports a variety of data connections ranging from XML to Excel to Relational databases such as Oracle, SQL Server etc.
The product was originally created by Crystal Solutions Inc as Quick Reports and by version 3.0 it was acquired by Seagate in 1994 and re branded it as Crystal Decisions and they rolled out versions from 4.0 to 9.0. By 2003 it was again subject to takeover by Business Objects and they subsequently released versions 10, 11 and 12. The product changed hands again in 2007, this time acquired by SAP and they had gone on to release the newer version as Crystal Reports 2011(14.0) in 2011.
When using this tag, also use the crystal-reports tag for increased visibility.