Friday, August 6, 2010

Open Source BI Report tools

I am going to take a mulligan on a previous Blog Post on Open Source BI reporting tools. Part of my job at Calpont is getting familiar with tools folks with use with the InfiniDB storage engine. After all, what is the point of having all those terabytes in a data warehouse if you can not produce some sort of report from them. Three popular open source BI reporting tools are available from BIRT, Pentaho, and Jaspersoft.

Proceeding alphabetically, BIRT is part of the Eclipse IDE world. A BI report is a new project or new report under a project. And if you like Eclipse or Java IDEs, then you will probably like BIRT for reports.

Pentaho's Rerport Designer is a stand alone program. As is iReport from Jaspersoft.

I had no problems connection to a data mart in a InfiniDB instance with the old JDBC connection with any of the products. And all three produced reports of various levels of complexity from my SQL. Plus you can pretty much format the exams to your heart's content.

So which is better? That would be up to the user having to run the software. For those of you really interested, there will be quick start guides up soon on each of the three BI tools on the Calpont InfiniDB website. If I missed your favorite BI reporting tool, please let me know.

Now I am digging through the ETL tools. I was getting a millions and a half rows a second into an InfiniDB table using the cpimport tool. Now to get the tools and cpimport working together!

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