Back in my consulting days a client had a report that took 45 minutes to an hour to run. I designed an Access database to pull the data, par it down and then call the Crystal Report it was based on. Took 90 seconds total. 

Back in my consulting days a client had a report that took 45 minutes to an hour to run. I designed an Access database to pull the data, par it down and then call the Crystal Report it was based on. Took 90 seconds total. 

CR is great at report formatting, not so much at complex data processing.  I had a report batch that took 18 hours... and moving the joins / logic into SQL Views, it now runs in under a minute (not to mention being so much easier to maintain).

If the reason for scheduling is report performance BigLouie's recommendation of MS Access (or my preference is SQL Express) to do some of the the heavy lifting can really speed report run times.

If you're not running Premium, SQL mirroring is a good choice to speed up processing and creating complex reports outside the scope of an ODBC connection.