We have a database (SQL Server) that has a field in which we store fairly-hefty (1-4MB) XML documents. We need to create reports. Lots of reports.

The schemas upon which the documents are based are quite complicated and we have thousands of records.The reports need to be modifiable by inexperienced programmers, so a visual report designer is an absolutely necessity. Any opinions on good tools? (Big Faceless has high Google rank. Anyone use it?)

I d/l'ed a demo of Crystal Reports, but:

• Found it hard to configure my data source and schema (and even though I thought I finally got it right, although I can now see the "tables" and "fields" from my schema, it still says Records: 0)
• Am not sure I can configure it to use an XML database field as a datasource

Am I a fool to use Crystal Reports or just a fool to not have figured it out?

Anyone looking for some freelance report-generating work?