Open Source BI -- Pentaho and Jaspersoft Part I

Hey DBAs! Are you seeking more efficient ways of shifting through your data to aid your business operations? Two popular Business Intelligence products have community Open Source software are Pentaho and JasperSoft. And both work with MySQL.

Both are easy to download and install. Both will use a JDBC connector to connect to MySQL. But how easy are the two to configure and run a simple report against a running instance of MySQL?


Setting up a JDBC connection with JasperSoft or Pentaho is pretty much like using any other JDBC connection.

The next step is to setup a query like SELECT name, job_title, department FROM employees, departments WHERE employees.emp_id = departments.emp_id. Either package will let you pick a variety of output templates. Then you have the BI software merge your query with the template. I honestly think an average MySQL DBA could fairly quickly generate a nice looking report from their instance and that JasperSoft would be just a little bit faster.

In part two of this series, the steps will be more detailed and documented. There will also being comparing and contrasting of the two products. Both products are part of larger projects and there are many useful tools that work with the BI software that you will want to investigate. More on those in later posts.

And in a short time you should be able to download a Virtual Box image with both community BI programs and a InfiniDB instance with some data sets. This way you can test all three simply. I would also consider doing a VMWare version if there is demand for it.