I tried to google this but I failed.
Is there a way (I know it is, found this link but with insufficient details) to connect to crystal server's database?
We are runnig many reports daily which sometimes fail, sometimes don't run at all, we accept this as a part of server imperfection. The issue is, that checking each reports instance through CMC is very inconvenient and time consuming. If I could check it directly in some other way it would be much easier to manage.
The server version is 12.0
While the CMS repository is a plain database, querying it directly (using SQL) is discouraged, unsupported and generally a bad idea.
If you want to query the repository, you have several other options:
Use the built-in Query Builder web application (a web application called AdminTools, normally deployed on your application server). This offers a SQL-like interface for querying the repository, though a lot of SQL features are not available (e.g. table joins). Official documentation is also generally lacking for Query Builder, but if you're interested, there's a very good guide available here.
Use the Java or .NET SDK to query the repository. SDK documentation is available on SAP SCN. This is the most powerful option, but also requires you to do everything yourself. And it will take some time to become familiar with all the different classes and how they relate to the BI Platform.
Use a 3rd-party tool. Different solutions exist, with different feature sets, although it seems that most stopped working when BI4 came out, and the ones that exist usually require a server component as well.
Additional information:
You could also more-or-less automate the querying of the repository (although it's very basic) by following the instructions outlined in this blog post.