SQL View

Which DBMS? Yes, you can add a view using DBMS tools, and Lawson won't prevent it. You can even go in and add that view to dbdef. Add it as a table, since lawson treats them the same. If you do that you can use lawson tools to access data via the view. I've not really found many good reasons to do this however. What problem do you think this would help solve?

Yes definetly. There are directions on the Lawson site on how to do that for Oracle. The procedure is roughly the same for SQL Server. If you don't need the views to be visible to Lawson proper then it can be simpler. We are using several views. If you have the PSASRV Lawson (Time and Expense...) then it installs quite a few views and also some triggers. You do need to watch out for varchar columns as you will need to run some ed.... command to tell Lawson that the table/view has varchar data in it.

How about if you create another database, say in the sql server LawsonProd. Theres LAWSON and LOGAN. I am thinking adding another database to store all these none LAWSON object such as tables, views and stored procedure. Thoughts?

My experience is in Oracle, but I find it easiest to keep custom objects in the lawson database. I just use a unique prefix to identify all the custom objects. If you do that, the regular lawson tools can find them easily. You can certainly create another database if you want. In my case it would seem to be more effort for no particular benefit.

For the savy crystal user we have always tried to ask them to use the correct indexes to make their run time a bit faster. For a more complicated sql task that requires a lot of table joins, we do ask them to have cobol programs do it or that we create a mini data mart in oracle called materialized views which can be refresh is any frequencies.