I'm looking into setting up a database in Amazon RDS for use with Crystal Reports. Crystal will be running in our office in California and the DB will reside in the Amazon cloud servers in Virginia. Is this advisable or should Crystal and the DB reside on the same LAN?
I have no experience with Crystal, so I don't know how data-intensive the connection with the DB is. I have used Aqua Data Studio and even SQL Server Manager from my box in California to run queries and perform operations on a SQL Server 2008 db hosted by Rackspace in Dallas. Performance was surprisingly good.